The crystal throne room was silent. Violet was the first to arrive, shortly followed by Jack and Alex. They'd talked briefly, making sure that everybody knew to behave for the length of this meeting. Amber had left a message with Violet, and Mel had too. She relayed both to the other dead members of the Rainbow Knights. Alex said that she understood. Jack said it was stupid, they couldn't let Amber off so easily for letting the prisoner escape. But eventually he'd agreed that defeating the Enemy was more important than arguing about things that were too late to change.

"Right," Violet said, once Arnie and Mel had both appeared. "This is a room without secrets now. There's some things from the ancient memories. Mostly Orsertro's, but maybe some of mine too. Maybe you've all got bits the same. Things that you're too embarrassed to mention, if you remember that you did something wrong, or something stupid, all those thousands of years ago. This isn't about Amber keeping secrets from us, right? She isn't our enemy, she wants to do the right thing as much as we all do, but you know that some things can be really hard to say. Especially when there's people trying to twist everything into evidence of what they believe happened."

"Nobody's trying to twist anything," Jack snapped, "We all know that–"

Alex put her hand over his mouth, and held it tight until he stopped trying to talk. For her, at least, he was willing to wait.

"Don't talk about what we all know. What you have is a story, that you think explains everything, and every new detail, you're trying to work out how it fits into your story. I agree that everything seems to point the same way. But there might be more than one story that fits the facts. And even if there isn't, bringing it up doesn't help us. We need to hear all the facts first, and then we start thinking about how all those events fit together. Don't start saying how some word or other proves Ammadrine is a monster, because then we'll never finish the story, and we won't have all the facts. We need to get at the truth."

"Right," Jack shook his head, and glared at Alex and Violet alternately. "Because imagining there might be some other answer is really going to help us."

"Yes, it is," Violet was almost shaking; Jack could be a scary man when he was angry, but she knew she had to be impartial here. The one keeping order. "You've decided on an answer, but you don't have all the clues. We need all the clues to work out where the Enemy is, what she's doing, and why. We need to know if it's Ammadrine that's gone crazy, or this guy whose body she's in. And we need to know how to stop her. But Amber has more of the facts than most of us, she might know Amma's weaknesses. So we need to listen to what she has to tell us. It seems obvious it's either Amma or her host, but if you say that, Amber will be upset because it doesn't fit with what she remembers. She was Ammadrine's best friend once, remember. And just because the Enemy is crazy now, doesn't mean she was a monster in those ancient times. Understanding what happened to her might help us to understand what she's doing now, so we can stop her. We can think that. We can even be sure. But we can't say it, or we'll never know the truth."

"Fine. Just don't go thinking too much about her fairy stories."

"And if you try to make this a council of war before we have all the facts, you will have to leave. This is still my dream." Jack didn't say anything to that.

A few minutes passed, and then Amber woke up in the chamber. Everyone was waiting for her.

"I'm sorry," she shook her head. "Is anybody hurt?"

"Not too bad," Arnie got up from her seat, and went around to hug Amber. "You saved us, you know. We could have died there."

"Yeah, because of –" Jack started, and then a glance from Violet cut him off.

"I'm sorry, I let him go," Amber looked down at her hands. She couldn't even look at the others, but Arnie put one hand on top of hers as a sign of support, and that seemed to make her feel a bit stronger. "I just remembered, or half-remembered. Jack said something that Nico said before. A long time ago. And Ammadrine was holding the Totem Doll, that Madir was holding when we had the meeting. I think I somehow remembered a bit before I went to remember it properly, and I was like, terrified the same thing was going to happen again."

"What thing?"

"The Totem Doll, that crystal statue. It's a weapon. It was designed to capture Ammadrine's soul, and make sure she couldn't fall in love. Everybody agreed that it would make it easier to fight the demons, if we weren't having arguments between us all about who loves who. But only Madir and Nico wanted to use the doll, everybody else thought that's almost like murder, and we had to try everything else first. I remember being upset about it some times before, but it didn't make sense until I knew what the doll was. We all decided it should never be used. We had a vote, and ordered Madir to destroy it."

"But he didn't," Mel whispered, "Me and Madir were scheming together, she said. That makes so much sense, when you say it like that. Yes, we agreed to destroy that thing, because it subverted the intent of our reincarnation and could effectively kill one of us. But Madir wanted to use it anyway, so he kept it in secret, and when Ammadrine found out..."

"I think Belmadir is the Enemy," Amber whispered. "He wanted to kill one of us. He wasn't trying to do the right thing like Jack is, or trying to protect us. That's the difference, you wanted to kill Ammadrine and let her come back because you think she's the Enemy and you don't know another way to stop the monsters. But Madir, I saw him there, and he was so angry. Even Roudi was scared, I think. It's almost like he hated her, he wanted to hurt her, and it was just an excuse. He said that having human feelings might stop us having powers, and without those powers the Pangean Empire would get beaten by the demons. But we already had feelings. He hated Ammadrine, and all that was just an excuse. She was already in love with somebody, and her powers didn't stop."

"A guy can sound angry without being a monster," Jack said, doing his best to keep his own voice level.

"I think she's right," Mel shook his head. "She had feelings, we can't deny that. But she wasn't the only one. We've seen suggestions, some clues to suggest that she was sneaking around, trying to hide from the rest of us, carrying a weapon. But that's all. For Belmadir, the scene Amber described, and the one I've just come back from. Belmadir tried to kill her, and use his technology... oh no."

"What?" Jack snapped, but Arnie had already seem what Mel was thinking.

"That crazed announcement yesterday," she said, "He talked about changing the Princess's memory so she'd do what he wanted. That had to be Belmadir, because he's the one who had machines to play with memories. He's the one who understood reincarnation, he was always the first one we spoke to in new bodies. Ammadrine couldn't do that even if she wanted to, so why would she say that?"

"She's not one of us, though," Jack insisted, "And she can use all of our powers because that's what 'magic' means."

"No," Alex shook her head, "The Enemy uses magic, which means using all of our powers."

"And that was Madir's power," Amber added, "When we talked about how we were going to fight the demons without Ammadrine, he said he'd invented a machine that could let us use each other's powers. So we know that he has 'magic', whatever it means."

"I think he was jealous," Violet added, "That makes sense out of what he said to me. He was in love with someone, and he couldn't do anything about it because we were supposed to be pretending we're not human. He was mad because Ammadrine had somebody she could talk to about it. He had to hide, but somehow it was okay for her because she's a girl."

"I thought we were just talking about what we've seen," Jack said sternly, but without any anger. Even he couldn't deny that their deductions made sense. "Let's have the facts. Everyone, share what you've remembered from the past. The things you might not have mentioned before."

And they did. Amber started, but most of the others had something new to offer. A harsh word, a little rudeness, a mistake in battle. It was only human to deny your mistakes, after all.