Chapter Three "Revelations"

Noah stared, waiting. The kid sitting beside him could pass for anything between fourteen and nineteen when she wanted, a fact that mirrored her acclimatized maturity coupled with her ability to seem just like any other ordinary, inexperienced teenager. He knew harrying her wouldn't make her say whatever she had to say any faster. As the wind swept some of her hair in front of her face again, Noah took a proper look at her. She looked better than when he'd last seen her… what was it… four months ago? Three? She'd seemed pretty worn out then, and must've been at least a few pounds too skinny for any self-respecting father to like. Now her cheekbones cut across her face in a more natural way, and he was glad to see that the garish hair colors had gone. In fact he was reminded of when he first met her, aged ten; granted, her hair had been a slightly lighter brown, and it hadn't had the auburn tint that it had now, but she was definitely healthier.

The eyes were still years too old though.

"What do you know about what happened to him?" She asked.

"I know that he was taken back into the police station and that less than ten minutes later he was missing. From that I assumed it was a cop that took Jeremy," Noah paused, but when she made no show of answering, he continued, "I know that less than three hours later his body was strewn in the middle of Main Street, and that there's no way he could've survived the injuries he received without some external interference. The coroner didn't have time for a proper examination, but he gave us an educated guess that the cause of death was severe trauma to the head, but could've been a number of other injuries, including a broken neck. He said it was quite difficult to tell just from looking because of the state the body was in. I also know that the next day he was suddenly alive again and a number of his injuries were significantly less serious than they had seemed.

"Your turn."

She sighed.

"I know that Hiro has a brain tumor, that you and Peter went to Jeremy's house to get his ability. I saw everything that happened inside, and I saw him get locked away." She hesitated, almost as if she was wondering whether to mention something or not. "I saw that Jeremy never made it back to his cell, and I watched as he was forced out of some back entrance to the station by the deputy that you spoke to."

"Gill?" Noah broke in. She nodded.

"I saw Gill point a gun to his head as another guy got some chains and wrapped them around Jeremy's legs, still attached to the truck." Noah closed his eyes. Observed speculation was one thing, hearing it for certain was quite another. "I watched him goad Jeremy into killing him, and called him an outcast." Her voice faltered, but when Noah looked all he could see was her eyes staring softly ahead, unseeing. "I watched Jeremy stand there, doing nothing, even as the truck started moving," by the end she was barely whispering, and Noah regarded her with alarm.

"You didn't see-" smell

"It ended after that."

Noah leaned back on the bench and stared at the Styrofoam cup in his hands, any appetite for its contents gone. He dropped it into the trash can next to the seat, from which a faint odor was starting to rise. When he'd suspected that one or more of the cops had been involved with Jeremy's 'death', he'd thought one of the others, the ones that he hadn't spoken to. The unknown factors usually seemed to end up mattering a lot.

Gill… he'd like to wring the guy's neck for what he'd done to Jeremy.

"Did you see what this other person looked like?" He asked. The girl shook her head.

"I do know that he was in the police station when it collapsed, but I didn't see his face very well either time; all I know is that he was around your age." There had been six civilians in the station when it collapsed, Noah knew, and two of them were women - a young girl who had been attacked, and her mother. They had both been killed in the collapse, along with a petty thief who at the time was being held in the glass cell Jeremy had been put in. The thief's brother had also been in the building, but he'd received the least injuries of all the victims. Noah had read about the last two citizens in the town newspaper. One was an elderly man by the name of Jason Tubbs who was apparently a local hero – his family had agreed to have his life support turned off, but the other, a middle aged man, was currently in an induced coma.

"You know, you haven't actually told me why Jeremy's still alive," he said. Noah looked around to make sure that no one was listening in on their conversation, and when he turned back her gaze was fixed ahead again.

"I know." Noah listened as a small breeze blew through the trees nearby, glad for the momentary reprieve from the midday heat. "I stole a vial of Claire's blood from the Company," she said in a faded, blank voice, "I knew it would be useful to have. I decided to transfer it into a syringe a while ago; I didn't know whether just plain swallowing it would do any good."

She paused as he watched her fists clench where they were wrapped around her knees. "I couldn't leave him, Noah. I just couldn't. It didn't feel right. He- he wasn't meant to die." She trailed off and faced away to her left.

Noah was… startled, and yet not so. He did not doubt that she was telling the truth - he knew she thought it was near impossible to lie to him and get away with it, which it pretty much was. And his suspicion about Claire's blood had been well founded, apparently. The method made sense to him. What didn't was that it was her that had been the person who saved Jeremy.

Noah knew that she had started dotting around the US around a year and a half ago, but apart from the occasional and very useful piece of information she had sent to him through various means since then, he'd barely had any contact with her. Unlike many of the other evolved humans he'd gotten involved with in the past few years, she seemed to have remained under any radars that posed a threat to her. Of course, that had a lot to do with her power.

Cognition. The designated term for the ability to see and hear occurrences almost as if the holder of the ability was actually there. Unlike with Isaac's ability, the girl had only been known to witness events as they happened, not before, or even after. She had also never interpreted what she saw through paintings, drawings or other arts, or if she did, it was through conscious choice after the occurrence took place. It didn't have the obvious advantage of warning that precognition had, but whatever she saw could be relied upon to be accurate, as there weren't circumstances that were able to change it, besides the small possibility of a time-traveler.

A quirk of her ability was that the visions were always of someone connected to her in some way, whether consciously or not. Which explained how she knew so much about Hiro and Peter, their connection being the fact that they were all evolved humans. Of course, it also explained how she knew so much about Noah himself, entangled as he was in the lives of these people. This was how she'd evaded the Company's clutches for so long. That and the fact that she didn't do anything that got her noticed. At least, until now. Not that Noah blamed her; he could imagine some of the things that she must have seen, and he knew that in her situation he wouldn't have been able to not take action sooner.

"Well, I guess I should thank you," said Noah, breaking the silence between them, glancing away as an ambulance flew past a little way in front of them, siren blaring. "You saved a young man's life, that's not a bad thing." She only nodded to show that she had even heard him; Noah could see the troubled look in the girl's eyes and from her defensiveness had guessed where her thoughts were.

He stood and looked back down at her. She was a good six inches taller than Claire, but huddled up like that on the bench she looked very small, and very young. "I'm sure he'd like to thank you too, you know." She looked up at him, shock on her face, almost immediately followed by a mask that Noah recognized all too well. After all, he was very apt at wearing one himself. "Come on, what's the worse possible thing that could happen?" He asked, then waited for a few seconds as she stayed where she was. Noah sighed and started back towards the hospital entrance.

Quietly, she got up off the bench and followed him inside.