"We... should really go collect those samples," Ten looked expectantly at Rey. She'd gotten up from his desk and was now leaning against the lab station, peering into the glassware drawer as if Ten's collections of beakers and flasks was the most interesting thing in the world.

"Yes, you should," she replied without bothering to look at him. "Assuming it doesn't eat you. It's probably still hungry."

"If it eats me, you're stuck down here forever," Ten said matter-of-factly as he stood up from his desk and latched up his sampling case. "I'm the only one who can signal for this Module to be opened, remember?"

"Don't worry. I'll figure something out," Rey scoffed. Even his clapbacks were couched in concern for her. It was annoying how he only seemed to care so much - if he really cared, he'd tell her the truth about what they were doing down here. She no longer suspected she was a Xenonese prisoner, but she certainly didn't believe Ten's stupid Circle story either. The Circle, of all things! She really thought he respected her enough to come up with a better lie.

"I'm about to head out. Alone. Without my brave princess to protect me." Ten called through his cupped hands, dragging his feet as he shuffled toward the door.

Rey turned her head away so he wouldn't see the conflict in her expression. Every instinct told her to follow him, but she couldn't let him think it was okay to lie to her face. Thanks to his dishonesty, she couldn't put together the pieces of who she was without wondering if they were even real.

"... okay, then. I'm going," Ten announced slowly. Rey heard the door swing open before it reluctantly closed, leaving her alone in the lab.

She waited a few seconds before she turned around, just to be safe. It was hard to distinguish the exact moment at which Ten left the lab - he was so intertwined with the landscape that it didn't seem all that different without him.

Rey spent a few moments wandering aimlessly between the long, white workstations, tracing her fingers over glassware cabinets, microscopes, refrigerators, and other pieces of equipment she didn't recognize. Some instinct compelled her to take advantage of this moment alone in Ten's lab and uncover whatever secrets he was keeping, but the truth was, she had no idea where to even start. Ten's story about keeping her down here under orders from the Circle seemed impossible, but it wasn't like she could think of a more plausible alternative. Why would a scorned prince of Xenon protect the crown princess of Argon if leaders from the five colonies weren't secretly working together to secure their independence from Earth? She leaned against a lab table to ponder that question, instantly triggering a memory.

She remembered being in that exact position many times before in a similar lab - no, an identical lab. Ten's lab. She'd watch him work, sometimes in a comfortable silence and sometimes in a passionate argument. When she got bored, she'd throw knives at the dartboard on the far wall or try to find shapes in Ten's bacterial colonies. Sometimes, other people came into the lab to collect specimens or check on Ten's progress, but as hard as Rey tried, she couldn't bring their faces into focus. Ten was the only person in that lab she ever looked at.

She'd learned that the best way to clarify a memory was to lean into the details she remembered best. So she focused on Ten - the way his hands shifted the microscope's lenses, the way he knitted his brow in concentration, the black University of Argon half-zip he always wore over his clothes. Soon, the details around him became clearer. Most of them were pieces of standard lab equipment and unintelligible scribbles on colorful sticky notes, but a symbol on the wall behind his head caught Rey's eye. There were five small spheres connected in a ring... or a Circle. Five spheres... five extrasolar colonies.

This revelation instantly snapped Rey back to the present. She thought her instincts were telling her to trust Ten because he was using their past relationship to manipulate her, but what if he wasn't? What if he had been telling the truth all along?

If Ten were working with the Circle, he had to be corresponding with them somehow, and she'd never seen him with a wearable comm. Rey quickly scanned the room before her eyes settled on his desktop. She raced toward it, her heart pounding, and jiggled the mouse. The computer opened to the last screen Ten had pulled up - a microscopic image analysis program. Rey clicked out of the program and pulled up the desktop's call log. The log only went back sixty days, but the pattern was clear. Ten's only correspondence with the outside world was a weekly outgoing call to a contact named Circle Alpha.

"That's my dad."

Rey leaped up from Ten's computer to see him standing in the doorway, sampling case in hand. "Oh, and I got the cells," he said with a defeated sigh. He'd never been great at masking his emotions, and now, his face told her just how hurt he was to find that she didn't trust him.

"Ten, I am so sorry, but-"

"No, you're not." Ten scoffed, tossing his sampling case onto the nearest lab table. "You're Reynara Montanlast, wartime leader. Trust no one. Shoot first, ask questions later. All that jazz. Well, as you just saw, my computer's not even password protected. I have absolutely nothing to hide. I know you're used to people trying to kill you, but as I've been trying to tell you for weeks, I have never been one of them."

"Wait... what do you mean, that's your dad? Your dad's been institutionalized since we were kids."

"You know what? I shouldn't even be surprised that that's what you got out of that," Ten sighed, sinking into a chair across from Rey. "You never were very introspective. Just wait until you remember how many identical crappy relationships I've helped you get out of."

"I know," Rey said quietly. "From the moment I woke up, I've been trying to solve this big puzzle. Who I am, why I'm here, and what to do next. It's the only thing I've done... I think it's the only thing I know how to do. I don't think I'm someone who knows how to deal with things that don't have a logical solution, and people are pretty high on that list. I don't remember much about the war, but you're right about me being a wartime leader at heart. All I know how to do is push through. Even when the better move would be to stop and think."

"Wow." A small smile crossed Ten's lips.

"What?"

"The old Rey would never admit something like that. Maybe a little bullet to the head was what you needed all along."

"Sure it was," Rey rolled her eyes.

"Anyway, since I know you won't leave me alone until I tell you this, my dad escaped the asylum when we were fifteen. He joined the Circle and worked his way up the ranks to become their leader. He goes by Circle Alpha now."

"That's insane. He's the former crown prince of Xenon. If he were running loose and leading a dangerous secret society, I'd know... well, I wouldn't, but you know what I mean."

"My uncle, King Renzar, kept a tight lid on the whole situation. He didn't want to admit that his own brother was behind an organization that stood in the way of his plans for Xenon. He thought that knowledge might make his agents... conflicted."

"His agents?"

"Oh yeah. He and Aranzar put moles in the Circle. Tried to destroy it from within. They almost succeeded, too. That's how my lab got blown up. But now the Circle's gone to ground and the war's given Aranzar a much more immediate problem than us."

"Your lab blew up?" Rey asked incredulously.

"Well, technically, you blew it up so Earth couldn't get to our secrets. But yes, it was a Xenonese agent who tipped the World Council off."

"I worked for the Circle," Rey nodded slowly, confirming what she already suspected.

"You were one of our best." Ten looked up at her in admiration. "Your parents were so focused on the stupid war, but you always saw the bigger picture. You knew that when the colonies fought each other, the only winner was Earth. You saw how we needed to unite against the World Council if we were ever going to break free of this cycle of fighting for the homeworld's scraps."

"Sounds like I had big plans."

"And you would've succeeded, too," Ten grinned. "Just before you got shot, I discovered something incredible. Something that could change the balance of power in this galaxy forever. But an important piece of it was lost in the explosion."

"That's why you've been working so hard to restore my memory."

"Well - no!" Ten looked horrified. "I've been trying to help restore your memory because I lo - I like who you are. And your planet needs you."

"No, I wasn't criticizing you." Rey stood up from her chair and stepped closer to Ten. "You're being strategic. That's good. If I can remember whatever this missing piece is, we can use it to bring my parents' killers to justice and maybe even end the war. Speaking of which... what did you discover, exactly?"

"We called it the God Sequence," Ten said with a wistful sigh. "It's like a molecular sewing machine, capable of stitching together and stabilizing novel nucleic acids in vivo."

"The power to create entirely new forms of life," Rey whispered apprehensively. "Sounds like the kind of Pandora's Box that no one should ever open."

"You said something similar before."

An awkward silence followed. Rey could tell that Ten had more to say, but he stubbornly refused to speak. Her instincts told her to press him on the issue, but she chose not to. She'd been suspicious of him since the day she woke up, and so far, her doubts had amounted to nothing. It was finally time for her to actually start working with the genius biologist who saved her life.

"Might this God Sequence have something to do with the freak of nature that's trying to starve us to death?"

"I hope it doesn't. My dad said that the creature isn't what I think it is and that reassured me for a while, but I'm... I'm not sure I believe him anymore. That's why I wanted to get the cells. To see for myself."

"Right." Rey had almost forgotten about the cells. Now, she watched carefully as Ten opened his sampling case. He donned a pair of latex gloves before taking a scraping from the top of a sample and smearing it into a microscope slide.

"Why would your dad lie about something like this? Why wouldn't he consider the risk to both of our lives?" Rey shook her head in confusion as Ten prepared the slide. "Maybe the man was institutionalized for a reason."

"Don't say that!" Ten let go of the slide and looked up at her with a kind of anger she'd never seen on his face before. "Renzar made everyone think Dad was crazy so he could become king. That's all there is to that story."

"Okay. I'm sorry." Rey had very few memories of the elder Prince Tenzar, and not all of them were positive. Clearly, Ten remembered differently.

"The cells are remarkably ordinary. They've got all the standard organelles - nucleus, a crap ton of mitochondria, and... a cell wall. Hm, that's strange. I assumed we were dealing with an animal, but these look more like bacterial cells than anything else." Just like that, Ten was peering through the microscope, all caught up in the science again. The look on his face transitioned from curiosity to confusion to horrified recognition.

"You know what this thing is, don't you?" Rey peered over Ten's shoulder.

"Let's just say that on the Circle's first try playing God... they may have created the Devil. And now - call it a sick act of cosmic justice or just really crappy luck - we're trapped down here with him."