Icheb's parents arrive to reclaim him.
Voyager finds the parents of Icheb, one of the young former drones in Seven of Nine's care, and takes him home to Brunali, a farming world raided by the Borg. Icheb decides to stay with his parents, Leucon and Yifay, and Seven reluctantly lets him go. As Voyager leaves, however, Seven finds that his parents lied about how he was assimilated.
The crew learn that Icheb's people engineered him to carry a pathogen that would damage the Borg, and that his parents have sent him in a shuttle towards a Borg transwarp conduit to be taken again. Voyager rescues him from a Borg sphere and destroys it with a torpedo beamed onto the shuttle. Icheb returns with Seven, who helps him see that he can choose his own path. The sixth-season episode explores Seven's growth as a guardian, and it echoes the earlier story Collective, in which Icheb's engineered pathogen was first revealed.