Matt didn’t go home that night. Balanced uncomfortably in his office chair, he spent the remainder of the evening dreaming of water.

This water wasn’t the dramatic ocean, plastered over the back pages of trashy fortune magazines which Colonials spent their time obsessing over. It was always the same thing with them – the endless writhing struggle symbolized by the waves crashing on the immovable shore. It was a prophetic dream of white foam and shattered fragments of shells creating a vision littered with insurmountable, yet unimportant death. Strange, thought Matt imagining what it would feel like to lounge on one of those beaches, how such a history of violence could become the basis of peaceful thoughts. How easily we were lured by a gentle breeze and distracted by the sharp contrast of the dazzling ocean and its white arc. It was a grand scene, Matt’s was bleak. He saw a shallow pool of water half hidden on Canceron’s Parliament roof.

In his dream, it is evening, and Matt stands on the concrete alone. Above, the Universe’s billion eyes peer down from their baffling, sky born patterns.

The pool is dark, failing to collect the abundant starlight in its unnaturally still water. He positions himself at its edge, bending down. His reflection appears almost at once on the atramentous landscape. It mimics his actions – a slow tilt of the head, its mouth opening and closing with the flow of Matt's breath. Observing the motions of his obedient twin confirmed a long held suspicion: his years on Caprica had made Matt so much older than before – empty, even. He had aged in ways only great sorrow could understand. It went beyond a deepening crease where the flesh remembered an expression – this age was yet to lay a mark on his skin. No doubt it would, when it was time.

Matt placed his hands either side of the puddle and lent forward. His reflection expanded, but did the puddle deepen or was it just the light?  Almost subconsciously he encroached dangerously near to his reflection’s surface, a breath from breaking the tension of the water. He was looking for something, perhaps some evidence that he was still alive even if it was only in a reflection on a dark patch of water somewhere in his mind.

As he shifted his weight over his arms, he noticed that his reflection did not follow. Instead, it had become still like the water. Matt rocked from side to side, but his efforts were returned with suddenly accusing eyes.

The quietness of the night gave way to the ruckus of a busy room, filling Matt’s mind rather than his ears. Searching, he failed to see anything other than the pavement, the air, and the increasingly sinister pool of water.

His reflection grinned maliciously at Matt’s fruitless searching while the noise grew more invasive. He now recognised the distinct baritones of the Quorum and amongst this aural labyrinth of threats and worthless arguments, was her voice. It was soft but clear. Matt tried to listen, but the more he strained, the quieter the voice became. Soon its clarity faded, and eventually it was swallowed up by the roar of the Quorum.

The pool smiled.

Everything became vapor in the cold night air, even Matt’s thoughts. It had been his pool of fears, and though he wished he could see Cris’s image in its dark waters, he knew that if he did, all he would see was her broken, lifeless body.

Matt jerked awake. The storm outside had subsided and the air was no longer black.




Vince listened to his interview recordings well into the morning. The more he listened, the more he thought himself perfectly suited to the political career. The creatures he had met at Parliament were among the most isolistic he had ever interviewed. Talk about herding cats. They scratched, slept, cried and stalked off – tails-in-air. More interestingly, each person, from cleaner to President sat opposite him and lied with varying degrees of success. They lied so profusely that it made it impossible to tell who, if any actually told the truth because he had nothing with which to compare their stories.

Vince couldn’t explain it. He had been left with a tangled mish-mash of events that were mutually exclusive. People screwed up other people’s alibis and placed themselves in multiple locations at once. The web of dishonesty was so thick that Vince had no other choice but to assume that they were all lying about separate acts, most of which undoubtedly bore no relevance to the murder of Colette Procris.

To combat this utter disaster, Vince set about creating lists. One for those who lied, but were not important to the case – another for those who lied but were potentially interesting, and a third, considerably smaller category, for those select individuals who could conceivably have told the truth.

Using this system, Vince had made headway. In the many hours spent under the harsh light of his office lamp, he had nailed down a string of office affairs and, a fact that he was currently beaming with pride over; he had discovered the weasel who had been leaking information to the press on a daily basis. Small victories.

More concerning though, was the growing list of liars who had no immediate or trivial excuse. It was not their manner, nor the content of their declarations that betrayed them. It was the memory of their faces; Vince could still see them, rigid and focused or giving way to tears. They were all dark, somehow. Even Matt, an old friend he let care for his child, didn’t overwhelm him with the greatest sense of trust. He’d shuffled him and the President back and forward between lists, finally settling them both in the, ‘most likely telling the truth’ pile for the remainder of the evening.

“And how long have you known the First Lady?”

Matt replies almost before Vince finishes reading the question. “Just over eleven weeks. Though of course, I’d known of her before then.”

“How well would you say you knew her?”

There is a pause of silence on the tape. “I don’t think anyone could have known her,” Matt said honestly, “that’s how Cris liked it.”

Vince had never changed his opinion about that line. It felt like the only whisper of truth amongst the thickening crowd of lies. It was worth listening to twice.

Vince fast forwarded through the rest of Matt’s interview, stopping when he heard one of the Quorum members engaging on an extended dialogue about the pressures of power. Vince listened for a while but the over indulgent passage appeared to bare little relevance to the case. It sounded as if the man was actually enjoying being questioned. Vince took out his marker pen and drew a red arrow next to the Member for Gemenon, moving him out of the sinister category. Not quite the murder suspect he had in mind.

The front of the player fell open and Vince reversed the disk. The tape ground through a couple minutes of static before the President’s interview began.




In the absence of a much loved star, light crawled around to explore the dark side of Canceron’s globe. It scaled the ceiling of its hemisphere, transforming the evening ink into pale steel. The ocean barely raised a curl of break water against the city edge. These few hours that separated the days, lagged to motionless. The sails of the water ships far below fell against their heavy masts and a silence, real enough to hold the world, stilled it.

A weary First Lady crossed the roof of the city building and climbed the steps of her shuttle. Her presently unwanted security guard wove in and around her, attempting to catch her attention with a repeated, ‘Ms. Procris’. Instead of responding, she held her coat tighter in a defensive manner, anxious to escape the cold.

Colette guessed Matt’s mood would be as unpleasant as her deception. She was not sorry… The life she chose demanded a lot from her ethical patience, and even more from those that chose to work around her. This time her conscience rebelled a little less strongly as it did every time. Eventually, she presumed she would stop caring about the means to secure the future of the Colonies. Until then, she let her stomach constrict and her stable migraine worsen – a small price for a step toward understanding the tension which was in turn, a step toward peace. Not that she ever truly believed it could be achieved. She doubted there was a soul left that at their most honest moment, believed peace possible.

In climbing the steps, she cast her eye out over the roof and saw that it was marked with shallow lakes of dark water. Each revealed the otherwise invisible imperfections of the pavement. A sea breeze rippled one of them. The grey morning drifted a shade closer to sunrise and a flock of gulls made their ghostly motion to a day of harvest on the water.

Colette purposely overlooked the Colonel’s hostile manner, easily evading his efforts to block her passage. She turned away from the world outside and vanished into her shuttle, leaving Matt standing alone in the morning.

He was not put off by her elusiveness, and proceeded to pursue her into the craft. “I survived your magic pills,” he started angrily as they moved through the lounge area, “to be rewarded by an empty room.” Both of them ignored the pilot, sound asleep in one of the leather seats. He snored quietly with his tie loosened and the remainder of his uniform comfortably arranged to serve as extra padding. Colette didn’t respond to the Colonel, instead she threw her bag onto a nearby seat and took her fog-dampened coat off. “What is a security guard to think when someone as important as the First Lady goes missing during the night in times such as these? You might as well be the President – you share assassination attempts and the ability to act with unparalleled stupidity.” Matt paused at the entrance to her quarters. Unable to stop his mouth from endangering his future with the Presidency, he made a weak attempt to put distance between himself and the First Lady.

She was furious on so many emotional levels that her husband’s body guard showing concern for her whereabouts equated to a mosquito trying to suck a little attention from a tired and irritable lioness. Colette had bigger things to hunt, all of which could wait until after a hot shower. She locked eyes with the Colonel in warning, hoping to scare him off before she entered her room.

Failing to maintain his distance, Matt followed, continuing with the monologue he had been expanding on for the better half of the morning. “Being drugged narrowed down the possibilities.”

She wondered how long it had taken the Head of Security to discover he’d been outsmarted by a female politician. As he continued aggressively, she started picking up on the flaws in his speech – an old habit she couldn’t shake since fifth grade debating. She noted that his tone was over practiced, the result of running something through your head too many times. Amateur. The best arguments were spontaneous, the most brilliant – unplanned.

The metaphorical bite itched as her black suited mosquito buzzed annoyingly toward the background of her mind. Desperate to make it go away, she took a swing at it. “Do you still feel queasy?” she snapped accusingly. “No? Then it worked, didn’t it.” Colette crossed the room and headed toward the bathroom.

Matt reached over the door frame to keep her in the room, “That’s because I was unconscious.”

“Kindly move.”

“No.” Matt lowered his arm to prevent her from ducking under it, “You are not leaving this room until you tell me what happened last night.”

Matt instantly found out what it was like to be her enemy in the public forum. Something snapped. He wasn’t sure if he’d succeeded in wearing down her patience or whether she’d run out of ambivalence toward him.

Her body language disguised her emotions from a distance, but they flowed unchecked in her eyes. Whatever raced through her mind streamed into his; Matt was inexplicably afraid, enraged, lost, anxious and a thousand other things he didn’t understand how to feel. Her emotions overpowered his, when she looked away, it ended.

His mother sat on the step of his childhood house while his father, older than he remembered him, emptied stale Ambrosia into the sink. Matt stood on Caprica for the first time and saw a short, brown eyed kid catching skinks on the wall of the airport. A new set of stars moved steadily overhead. He huddled in a tin cubby house with the skink boy while lightening ripped the summer sky apart. A down pour soaked him for days in the jungle with the sound of sporadic gunfire shattering the old Cydorwood trees. His own gun brushed lightly under his chin. Someone died and darkness blackened the memory of their face. The halls of Parliament House emerged out of the dark to curve gracefully overhead with their incense curling into the air and over the leather upholstery. The quiet secretary ignored him as he waited for the President to appear for the first time. A woman with fiercely black hair glanced at him on her way down one of Parliament’s hallways. He worried about were she was one morning on a foreign planet.

Memories from here and there filled the hole Colette had gouged so viciously in him during those few seconds. He was furious with her for making him look like a fool, but he’d be lying if that were the reason he was so upset by her deceit.

Matt watched the First Lady. Her mascara had dried into powder and fallen off her eyelashes, accumulating on the soft skin of her cheeks. Her hair was tied back roughly, like it had been re-done several times and her perfume was gone. Now she smelt faintly of fish, the sea and cheap scotch. “I waited for you,” he said finally, this time with a voice free of accusation.

“You were asleep; I didn’t think you’d miss me.”

“This isn’t about me,” he muttered defensively under his breath. “You ran off in the middle of the night without telling anyone where you going or who you were meeting with. We’re on the brink of civil war; a thousand people want you dead or know someone with enough money to have a go. I presume it was that Member for Aerelon, he’s the only reason you’d risk so much.”

“I wish the Quorum would admit to civil war as effortlessly as you appear to.” Colette stopped herself; why were they even having this discussion? She was about to talk highly sensitive politics with a person she barely knew. “Not that it’s any of your business, but he wouldn’t have come unless – ”

“Unless you did something incredibly dangerous and stupid.” That was the final step over the mark. He felt it the moment the words left his mouth and screamed right back at him through her face. She would hate him forever. Matt felt sure of it. Beads of sweat started to form on his bare scalp. The weather here was so humid; Matt didn’t see how she could bare it, wrapped up in her coats and blouses.

Colette moved away from him. He had no right to care so much about what she did. The last Head of Security trusted her, turned a blind eye when she needed him to. He was a friend. “We both chose dangerous lives Colonel. Your job is to protect me so that I can protect everyone else. But – ” she cut him off before he could interrupt with another ill-delivered speech, “for me to do my job, you can’t always do yours. I’m sorry.” She pushed past him and closed the door.

Colette was tired of all the frakking bullshit – of the constant surveillance. Mostly, she was tired of screaming at people she didn’t mean to and losing their trust because she didn’t have time to debrief them on her life or the reality of theirs.

Matt lingered in her room, listening as Colette ran the water for her shower. Her room aboard the shuttle looked as if she lived in it more often than her home at Parliament. The floor and bedside tables were littered with personal objects. A thick, hand woven carpet of deep sea weed lay across the floor which explained the slightly salty smell. Out the oval window Matt could see the edge of Yyima and Canceron’s ocean sweeping the horizon. The water was grey in the morning light – the heavy banks of fog having only just risen off their calm surface. Books and journals were packed tightly into the two bookcases either side of her door while on the rest of the wall hung several small, framed images. The jovial figures in these silk prints mocked him.

Culture watching him, judging him always.

Slowly Matt was coming to realise that this would be his heel. He quietly wondered when he would find his arrow.




Colette’s shuttle lifted gracefully off the rooftop. The city faded into a grey slur on the ocean surrounded by the dark specks of ships swarming near their hive. A reddish, orange line followed the curve of the world until the shuttle lifted high enough into the atmosphere to create its own sunrise over the planet.

Canceron fell away behind. The usual message about clearing the gravitational field of the planet and its moons before preparing to jump issued over the speaker. Cris freed herself from her seatbelt, and pulled her knees up, taking over the double window seat. She watched the stars appear and her favourite moon drift past before she began reading the document Naxos had given her earlier that morning.

‘In the interest of Colonial Security –’

Matt sat down opposite her. Colette quickly closed the document and tucked it into the seat pocket next to the window. “I’m sorry, about before,” he blurted out before his mind caught up. “I just – didn’t expect you to drug me...”

They sat quietly for a moment. Matt’s eyes had found an incredibly interesting square of carpet on the floor which he glanced upward from every now and then. Colette watched him carefully. His manner was honest enough. By honest, what she really meant was nervous. His hands fidgeted and he could barely look at her. It was hard to blame him. In all fairness, it had been her who took advantage of him when he was at his weakest. Men took that harder than women.

Finally, he seemed able to hold eye contact and relax enough to breathe. “You caught me a bit off guard, which hasn’t happened for a while. All those years in the army yet I was fooled by a politician.”

“We practice.” She said shamelessly, “I wouldn’t torture myself too much if I were you. It’s bound to happen again.” Colette grinned cheekily when Matt’s face dropped in a brief moment of terror.

What had possessed him to take her welfare under his responsibility? It would have been safer to have kids than give into the President’s plea to escort his wife.