Avon was nowhere to be seen when she returned. The body was gone, the floor had been cleaned, and there was no sign of the bloodied sheet. Soolin sat on the bed and wrapped her arms around herself. She still felt so cold that she might shatter, but the numbness was fading and feeling was coming back. It wasn’t welcome.

If someone had asked her if she could shoot a man should it be necessary she would have said yes without hesitation, it had never occurred to her than she would feel so hurt and shaken by the experience; like a child that had broken a beloved parents most prized possession. She watched the flickering light on the walls and wondered how she was going to get through the night when everywhere she looked she saw those reproachful eyes and the silence echoed the noise of gunfire.

After a while she got to her feet and crossed to medical supplies. At least she could make sure that she slept. Grabbing the sedatives she poured a double dose into her palm, then wandered back to the bed. For a while she sat and stared at the small white tablets in her hand but something inside her whispered that it wouldn’t be enough, just to sleep wouldn’t be enough. Even in sleep she would see those eyes and the question in them, ‘didn’t you know?’

She had known of course, at least once he had mentioned the Federation she had known, until then it had only been a suspicion. Yet it hadn’t mattered, not in that split second when she had thought he was going to shoot Avon. If only Avon hadn’t hesitated, if only. But he had hesitated and she had done the job for him without a second thought. That couldn’t be changed, not now; but knowing that didn’t hide the eyes that seemed to watch from every corner of the room. She turned the pills in her hand and wondered what a whole bottle would do. Stupid thought when she knew that, like Avon, she wasn’t ready to die.

Finally she threw the pills down onto the coverlet and went to find him.

She tracked him down in the shower block, standing unmoving under the water. Trying to wash the blood away, she realised. His clothing was nowhere to be seen, presumably it was already in the valet along with the bedding. One of the old cold weather suits was slung over a heater and his boots were standing beside it.

For a moment she watched him, the naked back was curved away from her, the dark head bowed into the falling water. She knew she should leave but she couldn’t, she couldn’t face the silence again.
“Avon,” she hadn’t meant to interrupt him but she needed to talk. “There’s a flyer, it's parked in the trees about half a kilometre away. The fuel cells are nearly exhausted. There are some rations, and basic medicines but not much of any use. I’ve covered it with branches for the moment but it will need to be brought into the hanger.”
“Yes.” He offered nothing more.
“The body?” she was horrified to hear the hint of a tremor in her voice.
“Disposed of.” Again he said nothing more.
“Yes. Do you think there will be others? Will they come looking for him?”
“Possibly.”
“Then one of us had better keep watch, the shield may not give us enough warning.”
“It will.” He sounded tired.
“Even so, I think I’ll keep watch.”
She turned away with an unexpected sense of disappointment.

“Have you ever killed before?”
His voice was low and expressionless and the words were unexpected. Soolin turned back towards him. He was still facing away from her but he had straightened and the water was now falling over his neck and chest. “You aren’t really Soolin, you admitted that. She most definitely had, but you? Have you ever killed before? That you remember?”
“No,” the word came out coldly but there was still that tell tale tremor. Her pride seethed at it but couldn’t stop it. “Not that I remember.” She drew a deep breath, trying for a calmer tone. “But I’ll get over it.”
He tensed slightly for a moment then nodded calmly,
“Yes, you will, in the end.”

Soolin left the showers and headed for the outer door but the sight of the night stopped her in her tracks. For a while she hesitated in the doorway, staring at the darkness and the shadowed snow beneath it. Her stomach was twisting itself into knots, presumably that was why she felt so sick. The sweat was gone from her palms but she still felt weak and cold. Shock, she knew that, but knowing didn’t make it any easier.

She hadn’t bought into this. It had never seemed possible that it would come to killing, not real killing. The gunfights of the matrix had been different, nothing more than target shooting, people shaped targets produced by a computer and Avon’s imagination. But they had looked like people, moved like people, sounded like people, even felt like people if she touched them, so why was it that the real thing had produced such a different reaction in her? That gun had been in her hand so quickly, she had fired without hesitation, without thinking about the outcome. In that second she had been the matrix gunfighter. But it hadn’t lasted, and now she was afraid of the dark and the silence. She was afraid of sleep, afraid of dreams.

A bitter laugh welled up in her as a memory from her school days came unbidden and unwanted into her head, ‘as you sow so shall you reap, as you give so shall you receive.’ Forgive me Avon, forgive me!

The starlight seemed to fade leaving only blackness before her. The shadows had a watching look about them. Superstition took over, rising wrath-like from some dark, untrained, unacknowledged part of her mind. She turned on her heel and fled back to the showers and the light.

***

Blake sat down in the chair and laid his gun on the table. Behind him two of Kearne’s people took up stations on either side of the door, weapons drawn, silent and unmoving.

The man in front of him looked briefly at each of them and then ignored them.

Blake leaned back in the chair as he considered the man called Carnell. The blue eyes looked back at him with no expression other than polite interest. The face, handsome in its way, was carefully guarded, and he made no move to speak. Blake met the shuttered gaze steadily for a second or two as he tried to assess the man in front of him. What he saw didn’t give him any comfort.
"My name is Blake, Roj Blake". His own voice was calm and quiet.
The other man sighed faintly, but he showed no sign of anxiety,
"Yes, I know who you are."
"So you have a good idea what I want to talk to you about?"
"Oh I think so."
"So tell me about what’s been going on here.” He leant forward slightly, “Tell me about Avon."
The bland, blue, scrutiny didn’t waver and the voice was calm itself,
"I think you already know."

Blake folded his hands on the table and looked down at his laced fingers. It took all of his willpower to keep his face as blank as the one in front of him, to keep the anger out of his voice. Even so he was aware of the tension in his body. Knowing how easily this man would read him he forced himself to relax.
"Humour me."
He was pleased that the words came out evenly, devoid of any expression.

The other man’s eyes widened momentarily and then he smiled a strange, rather reflective, smile.
"I need some assurances before I can do that."
The voice was charm itself but the blue eyes were cold and calculating.
"Of what?"
Blake's voice had become cold and flat and, for a moment, anxiety flashed through those eyes replacing the calculation, then it was gone again. The smooth voice was cool.
"My life, and the lives of the others."
Blake speared him with an unfriendly look, unconcerned about how he might read it.
"And why should I give you that?" he asked.
Carnell smiled slightly, but now the blue eyes were expressionless.
"Because you are Blake and not Servalan." His voice was gentle, "they had no choice you see, and I had no choice. I think you can understand that, after all isn't that the point of it all? Choice, or rather the lack of it."

Blake's expression did not change but he cursed inwardly recognising the message in the words, seeing the trap of his legend closing off his own choices. He had a fair idea of what had happened here and it enraged him, but that feeling had to be suborned, Carnell was warning him about forgetting that. A timely warning perhaps. Separating his anger about his own past and his anger about Avon was becoming difficult, and he was in danger of letting it take him over and dictate his actions. He was certainly in danger of focussing old anger on others, in particular on the bland face in front of him. He wanted to take the gun from the table and wipe that careful, controlled look from Carnell's face.

Blake was shocked to realise how much he wanted to see fear on this man’s face, to hear him plead for his life, beg to be allowed to explain. He hated the fact, just as he hated the certainty that the man in front of him knew how he felt.

But he couldn’t allow such feelings to take control of him. Maybe Carnell had taken a professional pride in whatever he had done, maybe more than that, but they couldn’t be sure. Choice? Yes perhaps it did come down to choice, and the reality was that even this man would have been given little. Do it or die. How could he expect him to have done differently? A voice at the back of his mind whispered that Avon wouldn’t have expected anything else. Damn it he didn't want Avon to be right again, not this time, and not about this!

"Orders, you just obeyed orders,"
He could hear the contempt in his own voice but it wasn’t enough, nothing he could say was enough. He wanted to do something. He wanted to reach out and catch the other man by the throat, to shake him until his neck snapped. But he couldn't. Servalan could, he couldn't, it was a simple as that. That was the difference between them, it had to be or there was no point to it all, just more death and destruction. This man knew it and his eyes openly displayed the fact that he knew it,
"No Blake, I just survived, we just survived," the calm, lilting voice was suddenly weary.

Blake said nothing for a second or two then he dropped his angry gaze back to his folded hands, carefully relaxing the tension that showed again in his stiffened shoulders.
"So you survived," he kept his voice carefully neutral " for the moment."
The other man didn’t reply. Blake looked up and met Carnell's eyes,
"Now tell me about Avon."

***

Avon was exactly where she had left him, back towards the door, but now his face was turned up into the falling water. If he heard her return he gave no sign of it. She studied him for a moment, taking in the reshaping of his body, the newly trimmed and sharpened outline and the play of the tautened muscle that had appeared beneath the pale skin. Elliot had done a good job in maintaining him, maybe too good given current circumstances. This was a body that might survive the privations of the winter, that might find no need to flee to man made comforts.

She wasn’t aware of crossing the floor towards him. Almost in a daze she put her hand out and touched his shoulder, curling her finger around the bone, feeling the muscle move beneath her hand as he reacted to her touch.
“I’ll get over it,” she repeated “but not tonight Avon. I need to get through tonight.”
He stayed still as a statue, staring at the shower wall.
“There are sedatives in the medical supplies,” he said calmly.
“I know, I thought about it; but it's not enough Avon, sleeping isn’t enough. I might dream. I don’t want to sleep, I don’t want to dream. Surely you understand that?”
She moved closer to him sliding her arms around his waist, pressing her forehead into his shoulders. She felt him sigh,
“No, I don’t suppose you do.”
There was understanding and resignation in his voice. And bitterness.

He turned in her arms and she tilted her face up to look at him. The water ran off his hair and brows, streaming in rivulets down his face. Like the tears he never shed.
“No,” he spoke quietly looking down at her with a hint of something close to sadness in his eyes, but no expression in his voice. “You need to feel. To be aware that you are alive, reassure yourself that you are alive. To remind yourself that this, life, was what you killed for. That it was him or you, and that it was better that it was him because that means that you are still alive.”

Soolin felt a surge of surprise, somehow she hadn’t though him capable of that subtly of understanding. She nodded, suddenly driven to speak openly.
“I didn’t expect it to feel like this.”
The sadness in his face intensified for a second, before he banished it leaving only the trace of an unreadable expression in his eyes.
“No, and unless you are very lucky it will never feel like this again.”
The words were barely audible.

She leant her face against his chest, hands gripping his upper arms, her voice was strangely child like, even to her own ears, but this time she didn’t care how it sounded to him,
“I’ll be alright when it's light. But not tonight Avon, not tonight.” Suddenly afraid she gripped him tighter, “Don’t let me dream!”
She felt wet fingers cup the back of her neck and he sighed again,
“No, I won’t.”

***

"Well?"
Blake’s voice was abrupt and his eyes were hard, tension obvious in every line of his body. Carnell read this easily and shifted in his chair, but he was perfectly composed as he began to speak,
"I'm sure you have a fair idea of what all this has been about."
He swept his hand in a small graceful gesture indicating the base beyond the door behind him.
"She wanted Liberator technology, or, at the very least, teleport." He gave an exaggerated frown, "No, that’s wrong, she needed them." He looked at Blake, a small smile passing across his face, " in the end even a Servalan can run out of choices."

Blake said nothing, but continued to stare unwaveringly. Carnell went on as calmly as if he were giving a lecture to a group of students,
"You see her position was, is, becoming precarious. She made a lot of enemies in her rise to power and she lost most of her friends, if you could call them that, in the war.” He shot Blake a suddenly hard look. “In the immediate aftermath the actions of the rebels kept her in power, she was seen as a strong leader who could be trusted to re-establish order."
He leant forward slightly and his smooth voice took on a harsh note,
"Order Blake, what so many of them crave."
Blake raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Carnell leant back again and gave him a considering look,
"She was a good officer in some ways you know, and it would be a mistake to consider her just a power crazed thug even now. Yes she wants power, but more than that perhaps, she wants to be seen as the one who brought order back to the chaos. The great leader, the unifying queen."
He looked at Blake for a long moment and suddenly his smile twisted,
"Perhaps she wants her legend too, rather than just a place in someone else's."

Both men looked up as a man arrived with a jug of something and a couple of cups. They waited while he put them down on the table then, nodding to Blake and ignoring Carnell, he turned and left without speaking. Blake poured a cup of the hot liquid into one of the cups, he had no idea from the look or smell of the contents what it was but it would do. He pushed it towards Carnell then poured a second for himself, smiling inwardly as Carnell waited for him to drink first. Surely he didn’t think it had been tampered with? Not while Blake still could not be sure what had happened to Avon. He took a small sip, it didn’t seem to have any taste at all but it was warm. He swallowed it and put the cup back down on the table, curling his fingers around it, at least it would give him something to occupy his hands, to keep them from the throat of the man in front of him.

Carnell took a couple of swallows of his own drink then looked back at Blake,
"Servalan wants to rebuild the Federation, the empire. What she came back to after the war was not what she had expected. The alien action had done more damage than has generally been admitted and not only to the Federation battle fleet.”
Blake didn’t reply, Carnell’s smile returned and he gestured lazily with his cup,
"Liberator technology would have made all of the difference. Even with a couple of ships like it the Federation could have begun to reclaim some of what it had lost. At least that was what Servalan and Space Command believed."
The smile faded and he looked pensive,
"I suspect it wouldn't have been quite that easy." He looked at Blake the pensive expression sharpening.
"Events so often have their own momentum. Have you noticed that?"
Blake said nothing. Carnell looked up at the ceiling and muttered almost to himself,
“And a time for every purpose under heaven.”

Blake raised his eyebrows but ignored the strange remark, though he knew his mind would chase the allusion at a later date, chiming as it did with some long buried memory.
"So Servalan went after Liberator," he prompted, "in person."
Carnell seemed to pull his mind back from a distance and shrugged.
"So it seems. Things were becoming serious, and her choice of trustworthy officers was limited. So she took a calculated risk.” He took another swallow of his drink before he went on, his eyes still on the cup. “I don’t know how much you know about her pursuit of the Liberator, after all you weren’t there at the time, were you?”
Blake stayed silent, but he seethed at the implication he thought he could hear in that maddeningly calm voice. If Carnell understood that then he didn’t show it.
“My information is that she came close to getting it on three separate occasions.”
The man’s eyes seemed to spark a brighter blue for a moment,
“Dayna Mellanby seems to have prevented it in the Auron incident, Servalan was sure it couldn’t have been Vila; and Avon stopped her at Obsidian and Kairos."
Carnell paused for a moment wondering how little he could get away with revealing.

Blake caught the look and stirred restlessly, aware of an undercurrent in those last words that he didn’t understand. But now was not the time to wonder what it might be, that could come later when he knew more. If Rai was right then this man was a professional and every look, every inflection could be a lie, a bluff, or a double bluff. Every truth might also be a lie, or a half lie. Not a desirable situtaion but there was no alternative, not for the moment at least, so he had to work with what he had.

"So she tried again using me as bait."
Blake’s voice was bitter but his face showed little of what he must be feeling. Carnell had a fair idea anyway. He cursed silently, that damned bond of comrades might yet kill him! Carefully he relaxed the tension that he could feel building in his neck and, with an effort, kept his voice calm and disinterested as he answered.
"Yes."
"She didn’t get Liberator though, why not, what happened?" Blake’s voice was harsher now. Carnell affected not to notice.
"I am not entirely sure. Avon appears to have suspected a trap and to have laid his plans accordingly."
"His plans?" Blake queried, determined to give nothing away.
"Yes, that or he lied to her when he said her he hadn't told the others about the situation."
Carnell’s voice took on a questioning note. Blake ignored it,
"You think he took them there blind?"
"It is, was, a possibility; but you probably know better than I do. I meant it when I said I don’t really know what happened. All I am sure of is that Avon did the opposite of what she had expected. Instead of accepting Servalan's offer he sent the Liberator away."

Blake smiled slightly at the hint of exasperation he thought he heard in the other man’s voice, and he couldn't stifle his own reply, despite his determination to give nothing away.
"Avon often does the opposite of what is expected of him, even the opposite of what he has said he will do," he took another drink from the rapidly cooling cup in front of him, "sometimes I think he takes a pride in it." Let him make of that what he would.
Carnell smiled in reply,
"It doesn’t surprise me. Certainly in the weeks that followed I learnt that Avon and his motivation isn't as straightforward as he, or it, appears to be."
Blake looked up again,
"Servalan's offer you said, and what exactly was that offer?"
"Your safety, some unspecified discovery and a way off Terminal."
"Terminal? Where the hell is that?"
Carnell's voice was reflective as he replied,
"Hell is probably a strong word but it was certainly an unpleasant place, " he smiled again, "exactly where doesn’t matter since it is no longer there.”

So the others had been right, Terminal could be moved. Certainly someone in this game had a lot of technical knowledge and significant resources. Was that someone really Servalan? He pushed the thought away and turned his mind back to the prisoner. The look the other man had turned on Blake was strangely sympathetic, but there was no being sure of what or whom the sympathy was for. It was there too in the voice, along with a trace of a question;
“Avon sent Liberator away knowing he could not escape. Perhaps he had never believed what he saw on Terminal, maybe he stopped believing when she told him that he was being given a way out, I don’t know."

Blake leant back and stared at the other man with narrowed eyes. Maybe that was true, but somehow instinct told him that Carnell was keeping something back.
"So what did he see on this Terminal?"
Carnell paused for a moment, then shrugged.
"You, he saw you."