It took about ten minutes for Exedore to regain consciousness enough to understand he'd been drugged, another five to realize he was tied to a chair in a wooden storage shed and that a man was watching him.

The shed was about 15 feet by 30, with Exedore at one end and the man at the other. The only door was bolted shut. A hanging bulb provided the only light. A workbench lined the whole of one wall. Tools and junk lay strewn about.

The man had dark hair and appeared to be in his early thirties. He stood with his back leaning against the opposite wall, arms folded. The look on his face was...what? A dour, sad expression, perhaps tinged with the faintest bit of dread and disgust. The face of a man who won't like what he's about to do, but will do it anyway. He looked familiar.

He stared at Exedore, his expression never changing. He seemed to be waiting for his prisoner to recover fully, so Exedore pretended to be groggier than he felt to buy time. Exedore couldn't remember how he could possibly have gotten there, and didn't trust himself to speak until his mind cleared.

It took another ten minutes for the drug to wear off entirely, during which Exedore slowly recalled his memories.

He'd gone to a party after going off duty. About a dozen micronized Zentraedi gathered in someone's apartment. No humans. Exedore had only gone because an adjutant had invited him; he hardly knew anyone there. He hadn't stayed long. Someone at the party – the man standing in front of him, he now recalled – had walked him to his car. Everything after that was blank.

Exedore strained to hear any sound from outside which might help him figure out where he was, but all he heard was birdsong. It was at an intensity birds only unleash when greeting a new day. The normal sounds of a city were conspicuously absent.

Feeling reasonably recovered, Exedore finally gave up the pretense of grogginess and looked directly at his captor for the first time. Speaking Zentraedi, Exedore asked, "How long have I been unconscious?"

The man replied in Zentraedi. "All night. Sunrise was half an hour ago."

Exedore didn't bother asking where he was. He knew his captor wouldn't tell him. Instead, he said, "I had two bodyguards with me."

"I left them unharmed, hidden in a copse just outside the city, along with your car. Knockout darts good enough for 24 hours. I'm not a murderer."

Exedore looked at him quizzically. "A non-violent Zentraedi with a conscience, who nevertheless kidnaps his fellow Zentraedi. What a puzzle. A mercenary, perhaps?"

"I'm human," the man said in English.

Exedore quickly reorganized his thoughts. "I see," he said, also switching to English. "You impersonated a micronized Zentraedi to get close to me."

"I spent a long time studying your language, your terminology, your history, your way of thinking, your body language. I created a fake identity and history."

"And you succeeded quite well."

The man finally moved. Almost casually, he picked up a photo from the workbench, walked up to Exedore, and held it in front of his face. "Recognize him?"

The photo showed a man with dark hair in his late twenties or early thirties, kneeling in an RDF uniform and smiling at the camera. His resemblance to the man holding the photo was unmistakable.

"No. Should I?"

The man laid the photo down. "No. I didn't expect you to, but I still had to ask."

"Let me guess. You lost a loved one during the war. You want revenge. You say you're not a murderer, so you'll justify my death by calling it an execution for war crimes. Maybe you'll even give me a brief trial here in this little shed, with no witnesses, to make yourself feel better. How am I doing so far?"

The man pulled a wheeled, moth-eaten desk chair from its graveyard by the wall. Piled in the chair's seat was a tangle of garden hose, a hedge trimmer, and a cardboard box full of junk. He emptied the chair, brushed a load of dust and cobwebs off of it, and wheeled it to a position in front of Exedore.

"No trial," the man said as he tiredly eased himself into the chair. "As for the rest...I have no idea."

Exedore gave him a puzzled look.

"I think...I just wanted to face you," the man said. "Just to see what you had to say."

"What I have to say is what I have always said, along with every other Zentraedi commander, including Breetai. We are sorry for the harm we caused. We wish we could undo it. We did it because the Robotech Masters mentally conditioned us, and prevented us from comprehending any existence besides warfare. The moment we broke that conditioning, we chose peace, healing, and restoration to the best of our abilities."

"I'm aware of all that."

"But you don't believe us."

"No, that's the thing. I believe you."

Exedore nodded toward the ropes which bound his arms to the chair. "It does not appear so."

"The Battle of Macross City," the man said. "Sometimes called the Battle of Defections. Sometimes called the Battle of Chaos."

"The battle in which Khyron penetrated the SDF-1's defenses and ran amok in the streets of Macross City, but was thwarted by the mass defection of his own men. I know it well."

The man's expression finally changed. It hardened. "Of course you know it well. You orchestrated it."

Exedore tilted his head in regretful acknowledgment. "I did. I was the clever one who devised the plan to lure the SDF-1 into performing the Daedalus Maneuver so we could sneak aboard. Over a thousand humans died that day, including many brave souls in the civil defense. If you wish revenge against the three Zentraedi most responsible for that attack, you indeed have one of them at your mercy. Another is Breetai. The third, of course, was Khyron, who is beyond all our reach."

The man glared at him for a long moment. "That's the thing about you Zentraedi," he finally said. "You express remorse, but it never sounds real. You're like robots."

"As you know perfectly well, our body language and speech inflection are different from yours. We convey information mostly through words. If we say we are remorseful, we are remorseful. It's difficult to understand why we must sound remorseful, or shed tears, for our words to be believed." Exedore's voice grew stern. "Especially when we back those words up with actions, such as risking our lives to save the rest of humanity!"

"Yeah, I know all that! But still, there's just...something missing. I don't know!"

Exedore looked at him appraisingly for a moment, then deliberately brought his voice back to normal to defuse the tension. "Who is the man in the photograph?"

"My brother."

"I take it he died during the Battle of Chaos."

"One of the first to die, just after your troops boarded the Daedalus. He was a hero! In his last moments, even after being blasted by your men, he summoned the strength to lift himself onto his knees to reach the phone. With his dying words, he alerted Captain Gloval that the enemy was on board."

"Ah, yes. I recall reading about him. The brave soldier who ruined the sneak attack and saved countless lives, because our troops failed to realize he wasn't dead." Exedore nodded. "You are correct, he is a hero. I should remember his name, but sadly, I confess I do not. Should I live through this ordeal, I shall gladly rectify that. He was awarded a posthumous medal, wasn't he?"

The man pulled a well-worn medal case out of his pocket. He opened it to show Exedore. "The Titanium Medal of Valor."

Exedore nodded. "And well deserved."

The man closed the case and put it back in his pocket. They eyed each other a few moments.

"What do you want?" Exedore asked.

The man shook his head slightly. "I don't know. Just to face you. Just to hear your words, look my brother's murderer in the eye. Just to know that you feel something, you heartless..." He grimaced, closed his eyes, and looked away.

"Do you want closure of some kind?" Exedore asked. Closure was a human concept he didn't really understand, but it seemed the most likely possibility.

"No. There's no closure for something like this. Just...feel something, you goddamned alien!"

"Feel? I told you how I feel. I don't know what I else I can do."

"No. You said you have remorse. You said you wish you could undo what you did. You've said it in interviews, and in military documents, and you've said it to me. But in all those things, over all these years, you've never once said how you feel!"

Exedore tilted his head, facing this new concept. "How I feel." He thought for a moment, and a small, sad, ironic smile broke onto his face. "How I feel. Very well. I feel..." Exedore searched for the words for a long time. "Dead," he finally said, surprising himself as the word left his lips.

The man just stared at him, not knowing what to think of this.

Exedore looked down, wondering at his own words. "I'm not sure I've ever truly been alive. I spent centuries destroying civilizations as an unthinking puppet. Then I realized there was more to life than that, but that realization came with instant guilt and sorrow. And those are the only two stages of life I have known. I woke from a stupor and went straight from there to hell, with no beauty or love in between.

"Now, duty and swimming through oceans of statistics are all I know, and are probably all I will ever know until I die physically. But inside, I am already dead, and always have been. I'm just barely alive enough to be aware of it."

Exedore looked at the man, and his voice was a whisper. "Death has many forms. Learning my life was stolen, used for destruction, used to murder people like your brother, and never real in the first place...learning I was an abomination from the beginning, then burdened with guilt until the end...that's just another way to die."

A single tear fell down Exedore's face.

He and the man looked at each other for a long time. Only faint morning birdsong lay on the stillness, as gently as a drifting feather.

From outside came the sound of tires skidding to a halt on a gravel road.

"That will be the military police," Exedore said softly. "Because I constantly receive death threats, there is a location tracker sewn into my clothing. I always report for duty very early, I have no life outside of work, and no reason to be absent. The moment I failed to arrive, they assumed kidnapping or murder and activated the tracker."

The man nodded. He picked up a knife from the workbench and cut the ropes.

"This is the police!" a man from outside said through a megaphone. "Come out with your hands up!"

"What's your name?" Exedore asked his captor.

"Fenton Wallace."

"My bodyguards and my car. You were telling the truth?"

Fenton nodded.

The voice outside again shouted through the megaphone. "Come out with your hands up now!"

Exedore stood, wobbling slightly on stiff muscles, and walked to the door. He opened it and held up his hands in a show of peace. "It's all right, I'm perfectly safe."

Exedore saw he was on a homestead outside the city, in a woodland. Beside the shed was an old pickup. Fifty feet away was a two-story house which had seen better days. A gravel road wandered past.

There were five MPs in full combat gear. They lowered their weapons and relaxed. "Sorry, Mr. Exedore," the sergeant in charge said, approaching him. "Your car's not at your house and you didn't report for duty, so Admiral Hayes feared the worst."

"Perfectly understandable," Exedore said, lowering his hands. "And I appreciate your fast response." He turned to Fenton and motioned him forward. "As it happens, I was simply paying a visit to my friend Fenton, here."

Fenton appeared in the doorway, resigned to his fate.

"Fenton suffers from PTSD and is sometimes suicidal," Exedore said. "He doesn't really have anyone out here in the country to talk to. I met him a few weeks ago while conducting a mental health survey of a random sample of humans, and, feeling sorrow for him, I gave him my number. He called last night, desperately needing help. We met at a restaurant to talk, but he was so depressed that I was still extremely worried what he might do, so I dismissed my bodyguards and returned here with him alone, leaving my car at the restaurant."

The MPs nodded in understanding and sympathy. Fenton just looked at Exedore.

"One thing which helps Fenton to recover is keeping busy with his hands, building things," Exedore continued. "I'm afraid we've been up all night in his shed, as he was showing me some of the things he's been working on." Exedore gave a chuckle. "We had no idea it was even daylight. I am so sorry for the false alarm, Sergeant. I let the time get away from me."

"That's all right, Mr. Exedore," the sergeant said, nodding respectfully to Fenton. "We're sorry to disturb you both. Shall we give you a ride back to your home or to headquarters?"

"No, thank you. I have a few things to wrap up here, first. Besides, Fenton owes me breakfast."

They all shared a smile. "What shall I tell the admiral?" the sergeant asked.

"That I will report for duty in a few hours. Please extend to her my apologies for my tardiness."

"Yes, sir."

The MPs saluted and climbed into their cars. Exedore waved as they pulled away.

The cars sped off, kicking up dust from the gravel. Within moments, they were lost to sight. The dust hung in the still air, lit by the sun rising over the trees. Morning birdsong surrounded the two men.

"Why did you do that?" Fenton asked.

"Because you are still alive and free, two things I will never be, and I want to keep you that way. I can do nothing for myself, but I can at least do that for you."

Fenton didn't know what to say.

"Now let's get going," Exedore said. "We need to retrieve my car and my bodyguards as quickly as possible, or we'll both be in big trouble."