Eve released the clasps using the small panel at the foot of the white slab on which Victor lay. Victor leaped off the table, catching his breath and massaging his wrists, sore from the struggling. Dixon groaned on the ground.

"Shut up, you," Victor said. He gave the boy a kick in the ribs to emphasize his point.

"Um, Victor," Eve said, looking down at his chest worriedly. The pin was still there. Victor pulled it out slowly and dropped it to the floor with a trembling hand. He gave Dixon another kick in the chest, causing the boy to groan again.

"Do you have a plan?" he asked Eve.

"I only got this far. We'd better decide what we want to do. The drones will be back soon."

"I know. We've still got to look for Ramka, too," Victor said. Eve hung her head slightly.

"She's still alive, Eve."

Eve didn't answer. Victor examined the room for an answer. He saw a vent.

"Eve, I've never known anyone to escape being put in suspension. Not once they were marked by Nexus."

"So what, then? I came here for nothing?"

"No. You still saved my life. And I think there's a way to game the system."

Eve gave him a doubtful expression.

"Trust me, Eve," Victor said, looking down at Dixon, who was now curled into a fetal position. "The system wants to be gamed."

----------------------------

Eve programmed the panel on the hyperbolic suspension chamber as per Victor's instructions. The chamber was a large, sarcophagus-like device with a small window over the face of those in suspension and a side panel for programming various instructions. The med bay had a wall of such chambers, stored lying down so that you only saw the bottom. It was easy to forget they were there.

She prayed Victor's plan worked. It was based on more assumptions than Eve liked, but Victor had refused to spend any more time in the vents. There was a small possibility that returning Victor to his side of the ship might 'reset' the citation, but the problem with that was that it brought them no closer to finding Najar.

Eve kissed her hand and pressed it to the glass over Victor's face in the view port. Next to him, in a separate chamber, Dixon was also in suspension. When Victor had grabbed the wrench and lifted it over the barely conscious boy's body, Eve had stopped him.

"You don't understand, Eve," he'd said, staring down at Dixon with the wrench raised in the air. "We have to do it now. For the sake of everyone on Nexus."

He'd been wrong. She understood perfectly well. Dixon dying would be good for Nexus. But not like that. Not brutally murdered in cold blood while unconscious. It would have destroyed Victor, transformed him into something ugly. For reasons she couldn't explain in words, Eve didn't want that.

It was more than a selfish wish, though. Eve was a great student of history and the social sciences. Countless studying of the past taught her something important: revolutions that started bloody ended bloody. And she had made up her mind: the students of Nexus needed to take control from HQ. At least long enough to expose the secrets that were putting their lives in danger. She'd need someone on the boy's side, and for some reason she trusted Victor.

He was on his own from here on out. Eve wouldn't wait for him, whatever she felt. She couldn't wait for him: who knew if he would even come back?

Victor had mentioned how he'd gotten to the girl's side of Nexus. According to his story, there was still a single weekly allowance left on the transport orb. Eve left the med bay just in time to miss the drones, already choosing who would accompany her to search the boy's side and who would stay on the girl's side to look for Rajia.

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Lucas woke late into the sleeping period on Nexus and immediately knew something was wrong. Victor should have been back to wake him for his shift by now, or else to inform him and the others that the transport had arrived. He hadn't. Lucas shook his head, feeling his annoyance grow even as he put his uniform on. He'd known what he would find: no one. Victor had taken the transport himself. Hadn't the past weeks taught him anything about depending on friends?

He calmed himself. Lucas reminded himself that he didn't know for sure that Victor had gone to the other side without them. He might've just fallen asleep outside of the airlock. Perhaps he'd even forgotten about the time, lost in his own thought. Victor was certainly the type.

When he arrived at the airlock, he threw his hands up in resignation. Sure enough, there was no one.

Should he even bother waking the others? What could any of them really do? He decided to let them sleep. If he woke them now, they would likely be so pissed off that they wouldn't get any rest. Like Lucas wouldn't. He walked to the Information Room. With all the strangeness going on aboard Nexus, he should double check that Victor had really left. The airlock hatch was a blind spot itself, but he felt sure that the transport would have to cross a number of the various hull cams.

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A nearly inconceivable amount of distance away, light-years upon light-years, a lone technician watched a wall of screens. The screens were his life, and had been so for the better part of a year. A similar place existed on both Fos and Tenebris, but they were coordinated in the top of the line room in which the Caretaker sat. HQ was trusting him to keep things under his watchful eye, and damnit he was trying.

Deep circles ran around his eyes. He was thin, wasted away from the slightly chubby man that had entered the room at the beginning of the year. All his needs were met. Anything he asked for was brought to him, but there was a catch: he could not leave the room while he still lived. It was what he had signed up for: a secret so large that every precaution had been taken to ensure that any meaningful leak was impossible. Even he didn't have the full picture of what Nexus was about. He did know that it had been a long time in the making, decades before the current denizens of the station had even been born.

He had monitored the student's health. Made sure that they didn't find out too much too soon, kept them right on schedule. The little rascals were getting out of control. He'd managed to get a lid on it, was rapidly heading back to scheduled revelations, but he knew it was only a matter of time before the Watcher's on Fos or Tenebris went over his head. He wasn't too concerned, however. He was the Caretaker.

The long days and nights locked inside had given him a certain empathy for the students trapped on board the ship. He shook his head. HQ might have their plans, but he had plans of his own.

For, no matter how hard he tried to block out or ignore it, there was one screen in particular that his eyes kept flickering down towards. It was a monitor that gave a live readout of the stability of Nexus within space time.

A silent red alarm light blinked on the screen even as the line graphs underneath a picture of the ship fluctuated more and more rapidly. The reactor shield was unable to control the anomaly after all.

The scientists at the main HQ headquarters hadn't told him, but the Caretaker was no idiot: Nexus was slipping out of the current space-time.