I scan the scene in front of me. It appears to be a market square in the middle of a busy city. I do not recognise the city, or the people. One way or the other, it is certainly not a Velocity court. I am a little disappointed, I was looking forward to not having to think for a few hours.

After a few moments, I locate Seven sitting at what looks like a small cafe. She is alone, of course, reading a paper text. She looks perfectly at ease in her surroundings, has even managed to perfect a slouch. I sigh. To anyone else, the posture would not mean a thing. To me it represents hours she has wasted perfecting imperfection. It reminds me that she hides her implants, that she is ashamed of the ability she once embraced. I wondered what the Borg would think of one of their drones slouching. A sign of imperfection, I'm sure.

She sees me, eventually, and stands. She does not wave me over - she has not learnt that gesture yet and I am glad for it. I enjoy her perfection. We stroll towards each other and she nods her greeting.

"Where are we?" I ask.

"Devore." She says simply, her voice giving nothing away. I wonder, quickly, what there was to give away.

"No game of velocity today, then?" I try to keep my voice even, not critical. I do not ask her where she got a programme of Devore from, and I don't even want to consider why she brought me to it.

"B'Elanna asked me to refragment the holodeck storage memory. I found this programme embedded in the memory, I suspect Kashyk left it." She answers my unasked question coolly.

"Oh?" I don't know why I pretend I do not care – something to think about, later.

"You do remember Kashyk, Captain?" Her mouth curved upwards in that practised way she had of letting people know she had made a joke. I smiled unevenly. We continued walking.

"Where are we going?"

"Shall I change programme, Captain?" She turns to face me.

"What? No. Why would you want to do that?"

"Clearly, this is not to your satisfaction. I apologise, I should have realised you had planned for our game of Velocity."

"No. No, Seven, it's fine. This was just – unexpected, that's all. Not bad, just unexpected." She seems satisfied with this answer, and we continue to walk. There are some market stalls up ahead, it must be some sort of fair. People are milling about, there appear to be groups of families. It induces a nostalgia, of sorts, but for something I've never known.

Seven in uncharacteristically quiet beside me. I am uneasy with this apprehension, I am not used to seeing hesitation in my Borg.

I talk to cover the silence. "What a strange programme this is."

"An unusual choice to leave behind."

"Maybe not so unusual. Maybe Kashyk wanted to leave something behind that wasn't unpleasant. He wasn't so different from us, Seven. Maybe he wanted us to look back fondly, too."

"Was he successful in his endeavour?"

"Oh, I don't know. This surprises me. I expect he knew it would."

We have reached the stalls now. On closer inspection, most of them seem to be day-to-day provisions: fruit, foods. The holo-characters are not intrusive, they do not proffer conversation as we wander through their stores, examining the goods.

Seven and I walk some more in silence, not avoiding conversation but treading carefully with it. We part company for a few moments, separated by a group of Devorans. When I catch a glimpse of her again, she is examining some fruit.

"I would have liked to have talked to Kashyk some more." She says, quietly, finally. I notice her hands move distractedly over the fruit. She is nervous.

"Oh?" I try to feign nonchalance, try to give her the room to follow this thought.

"We were quite similar, he and I." She picks up the fruit and holds it to her nose. I smile at the gesture and wonder who she learnt it from. I decide most probably Neelix. Strange, the things we pick up.

"How do you figure that?"

"In what we do." She stops and corrects herself. "In what I did."

I pick up a similar fruit and hold it to my nose in a repetition of her gesture. I don't know why I am surprised when there is no scent. "You were both doing your jobs. In a way." I smile behind the fruit at the thought of justifying their pasts. I wonder who I am justifying it to. For.

"In a way?"

"You were a drone, Seven. You had no conception of morality -- you were doing your job." I carefully placed the fruit back onto the pile it came from. "Kashyk was doing...what he believed to be right."

"You do not believe it to be so?" We begin walking again, and her question settles on me. I am silent, constructing answers that lose meaning when I try to articulate them.

"I asked Kashyk to stay." I turn to face her, I want her to hear this from me. "I knew what he did…what he had done and I still asked him to stay."

"It did not matter to you?"

"Of course it mattered to me, Seven."

"You wanted to remove him from his collective. Like you did me." I see straight away what she is getting at; I understood from the very beginning.

"Seven, you are very different from Kashyk."

"Yes. You did not *ask* me to stay."

She touches my hand. I note, not for the first time, the textured feel of flesh and metal. I cannot help imagining it on my skin, on my lips. I have to concentrate on what she has said, on what I will say.

Finally, I say, cowardly, "It is of little relevance what I think. To Kashyk, that is."

"I doubt he would have seen it that way. It would have been relevant to me."

"As I say, you and Kashyk are different people."

She nods at this, as if I have proffered the correct answer. We fall into a pace and follow the winding roads of this city. Despite first impressions, the programme is not as interactive as I suspected. The citizens we pass have a distinct similarity, it is quite unnerving.

Seven is quiet and I find myself irrationally angry at this. I want her to share the weight of this conversation. I suddenly feel like I am being interrogated.

"You admired Kashyk's convictions, then."

"No, not admired."

"You understood them." She says it like a revelation.

I stop. "Yes, in a way. He believed...believes that what he is doing is right. Is justified. I can understand holding onto something that tightly."

"What did you see in me?" I notice, abstractly, that she moves closer. I think perhaps that I should be worried by this, that I should stop it...

"I see perfection, Seven." I say, as she touched my arm cautiously. I watch as her fingers circle my wrist, as they leave white spots where she grasps me.

"I am not perfection." She says, moving into my body space deliberately.

"I see someone who hasn't let learnt to wonder how things could have been different." Hands pacing up my ribs, hands dancing at my throat. Like in a dream. "I see someone who has not yet realised what I have taken from her." I murmur, watching her twisting my hair around her fingers, as if it wasn't me, as if I were outside, away from this place, this moment. Her.

And then she stops. I think she finally hears what I am saying - or maybe just hears my voice - drenched with the inevitably of defeat as it was. She moves away. If I had wanted to, I suppose I could have seen that she was hurt.

"Is this what you said to Kashyk?" She says, not looking at me. Her voice wavers and all I wonder is whether it is a practised gesture as well.

"I told him that we choose things." I stop, almost too embarrassed with the memory. "I told him that we have to live well, because it is too easy to be bad. And can you imagine what he said to that? He said ‘it appears to me you've chosen neither.'"

"He did not want to leave Devore?" She says, moving past the uncertainty.

"No, he didn't see that there was anything worth leaving it for."

We walk.

"I do not feel that way about leaving the collective." She says, after a while.

"Ah, but maybe you should."

* * *

It begins to rain around us. Every where, the holographic characters scrambled for cover. It reminded me so much of home.

"Kashyk told me about this." I said, not to her and glad for the distraction. I held my hand up, waiting for the fat drops to settle in my palm. They didn't.

"Captain?"

"The rain, Seven. He said that his people believe that summer rain is like...like it gets so hot that the sky breaks."

"A hyperbolic folk tale."

"Perhaps." I do not laugh. Her comment is tinged with more than jealously.

"Perhaps we should move," she offers. I look around and see we are the only ones standing in the open. We come to rest inside a small shop.

Seven brushes her hand across her hair, wiping away the holographic rain. I study her, study this moment - it seemed almost real. Metal hands wiping away holographic rain. A drone offering herself to her baseless Captain. The question lodges itself between us.