He looked up from his computer work suddenly, guiltily, willing to swear that he felt the touch of someone's hands massaging his aching back just a moment ago. "Hey, whoever that was, man, that felt great!"

But everyone around him looked at him as if he had lost his mind, saying that no one had been by his area in more than an hour, because what he was doing was so important that no one dared disturb him at it. He sent one puzzled look to his compatriots, then turned back to the screen pensively. In his reflection he saw a brown-haired girl with serious dark eyes gazing at him with long familiarity. He tried to shut her out of his mind, but she would not leave. Then again, that was only to be expected, because she had not left his thoughts since he had been forced to leave her ten years ago. It had been a long time since he had really seen her, really heard her, really felt her in his arms, but Gina Stewart was not a woman who would allow herself to be forgotten easily. She had left her mark on him, and it was not a mark that would wear away easily, no matter how much time tried to weather it.

There were many things she was not: beautiful by society's norms, traditional in thought and ideals, so blind that she was willing to follow trends, passive enough to let others tell her what she should think. She fit none of the stereotypical categories that women her age would fall into: the party girl, the bookworm, the workaholic, the cheap trick, the housewife-in-training. She took elements from all of those and blended them into her own unique personality. She'd been an intelligent woman with a sense of humor that masked her deeper thoughts, a lover of sport with the fanaticism only jocks had previously brought to the pursuit; she had an iconoclastic mindset that startled people, even those who knew her well. She was a brunette in an age of blondes, full-figured in a time when thin was in, completely natural when everyone around her was trying to be something they weren't. For all those things, he had fallen in love with her, and all those things were what made her mark so indelible.

And her intelligence, her independence, her rebellious nature- all these things that he adored about her had gotten her killed, or so he'd been told. Someone who'd come north from the city had told him about the dramatic shootout and how she had died defending her friends from the enemy. The story had become famous, infamous even. She was legend, she was myth, she was a hero to all who believed in the cause.

But that didn't change the fact that she was dead, and she would never come back to him, never interrupt his brooding with a wry comment again, never soothe his tense body with her simple touch. He had half-suspected that would happen when he was forced to flee for his life, because the odds of both of them making their escape and being reunited, safe and sound both in mind and body, were just too long for anyone to compute. The confirmation of it had hurt, though, cut deep like a knife to his heart.

But he hadn't seen her body. No one had. The story had been repeated, passed around, second-hand, third-hand, no one knowing who had been the first to bring the rumor north. Could it be that that was all it was? Just a tale meant to take some of the heart out of the resistance? Was she hiding somewhere, pen in hand or fingers hovering over the keyboard, mourning his death that had yet to happen? Did she ache with the same ache he felt, a pain that was so strong it was tangible?

"Stop woolgatherin'," a stern female voice told him, touched with a distinctive city accent. "You got important work, so get to doin' it."

He turned back to the desk where important puzzles waited for him to divine their solutions, and it didn't hit him until ten minutes later that the voice had been Gina's. He resisted the urge to run around the base screaming her name until someone answered, mostly because she would probably yell at him for abandoning his work. They both knew that what he was doing there was more important than the fine points of their relationship; those could be hammered out at another time, possibly in the middle of the night when neither of them had anything they wanted to do more than curl up against each other and talk and cuddle.

So he tried to concentrate on his work, but it was hard; the problems in front of him were complicated, knotty, confusing, tied together in ways that sometimes went beyond his ability to understand. He had the logical capabilities, the comprehension of the way the system worked, but some of the intuitive methods made no sense to him.

An arm came over his shoulders, its pressure reassuring and strong. "Try connectin' those two programs together, see if it makes sense now," came the words in Gina's voice. "Jesus, this project needs a woman's intuition, one guy alone is just screwed."

He followed the suggestion, and suddenly the entire thing made sense. He jumped out of his chair, ready to give Gina a bear hug for her help, but when he turned to face the spot from where he had heard her voice there was no one there. The few programmers left in the room gave him half-hearted looks of astonishment, but as programmers they had seen stranger behavior from their peers, so they pretty much ignored his behavior beyond the looks of astonishment. Sheepishly, he took his seat again and got cracking on the next set of problems. They flowed more easily, and he didn't hear Gina whispering in his ear. He wished she would, though, because it made the work a lot less lonely. He had forgotten how much he missed her.

His sleep that night was restless; he woke often from dreams where he and Gina lived a normal life, free of fear and terror, collaborating on projects that earned them princely sums, their black-haired girl and their brown-haired boy running through their apartment on the river. As long as they had been together before he had been forced to flee, they had never talked about spending their entire lives together, but he couldn't shake the sense that the conversation would have eventually gotten around to that, and if he had asked her, she would have said yes. He didn't know how he could be so certain of her answer, only that he was; he was as sure as if she had told him herself sometime in those ten lonely years that yawned like millennia.

The long shadows of the night took on texture against his skin, warming to his touch. The thin, coarse sheet started to rustle. He laid his head against the pillow for the fifth time that night, and something filled the empty space within the bed. He wrapped his arms around the memory of Gina- but was it just a memory? She was too solid, too real, too familiar to be just a figment of his imagination. "Quit worryin' so much, you'll get gray hairs," she said, and he stopped worrying.

When next he woke, he couldn't remember what he had dreamed, or if he had dreamed at all, only that he had finally gotten some rest. He smiled for the first time in a long time. The mirror above his dresser showed only his face, but he saw two reflections in its surface. Gina put her arm around his waist and looked up into his eyes. "Hey, looks like we got a shot in hell of making it out of this after all," she said. "See what happens when you listen to gossip? You almost lost me that way. But I'm not leavin' you now. I'm here for you, love. I'll always be here."

"And I love you all the more for it," he replied. For that, she kissed him on the cheek, giggling at the touch of his morning bristle against her lips.

But as he tried to hold her close, she was gone as if she had never been. The morning light scythed through the place where she had stood. He seized the mirror and shook it as if that would bring her back out, cause her to come tumbling through its frame.

"Dude, you all right?" Terrell asked, poking his head through the door sleepily.

"I was just- I thought- Gina was-"

"Man, you got it bad. Gina's dead, remember? Died last year."

"That's what you keep telling me." But he was sure he knew better. Trying to explain that to Terrell would take too much effort, though, so he didn't bother. Gina was around... somewhere... somehow. She was too proud, too fierce, too stubborn to fade gently into that good night. It didn't matter anyway. He was happy for her company.

"Quit woolgatherin' a'ready!"

"Okay, okay!"