Author's Note: I made a mistake in Chapter 3 that I have now fixed. It said that Jessi had stayed at the shelter for a little less than five months. It should read three. My apologies.

Chapter 4: Unexpected

She brought Charles into her memory of the tiny dungeon she'd called home for nearly three months. Jessi released his hand as he visibly panicked from the drastic change in surroundings. To his credit he didn't say anything but he did put his hand into his pocket, which she noticed with curiosity. Her gaze steeled further when she realized he'd come prepared with some sort of weapon.

When he grasped nothing in his pocket he looked her in the eye and yelled, "What did you do to me?" He didn't let her respond. "Where's my knife?"

She had plans for every potential reaction in her head. She had prepared scenarios and had been reasonably certain that an aggressive reaction was the most likely, as was the case here with Charles. She had to defuse the situation first then make him see reason. Logic and reason would work with the people she would recruit only because they were very smart, definitely well above average.

Yet Charles was nowhere near her or Kyle. She had yet to discover anyone as advanced as they were. She resisted the pain in her heart; it was still fresh. This was the safest place to be. Inside her head, in her memory, she couldn't accidentally break anyone's neck, and they had no chance to harm her, not that they had much of a chance to begin with.

"Charles," she started, raising her arms in a non threatening manner. "You're safe; you're in my head."

He looked around wildly. "Your head's a crappy little room?" His gaze stopped on the wall beside the head of the cot. He saw her scribbling, her doodles. Before leaving she had erased them but she kept them here.

Kyle + Jessi = Kessi. She noticed it too and resolved to remove the doodles and notes from future recruiting sessions. That single scratched note would produce more questions than she wanted to answer in what needed to be a very short session, no more than five minutes.

"So who's Kyle?" He'd easily deduced from her introduction as Kessi that she was in fact Jessi and therefore asked the obvious question. Yes, she'd have to remove that doodle.

Even so, the true answer came to mind but she didn't voice it. Kyle had been everything to her, even heartbreak and frustration. For a while at least he'd also been bliss and love. Her train of thought threatened to spill onto some tracks she didn't want to travel on. She couldn't believe she'd not considered it sooner.

"I'm pregnant," she muttered to no one in particular.

"Kyle knocked you up then," he asked, leering at her.

They'd been two feet apart but after that nasty comment she was beside him with her hand to his neck in the blink of an eye. She lifted him but didn't squeeze. She could have squeezed his neck down to the width of a millimeter and it wouldn't have done anything anyway.

Nonetheless he thought he was being choked. "No!" he yelled. He put his hands to his neck for two seconds before he also noticed no harm coming to him. "Shouldn't this hurt?"

She released him and he landed on his feet. She shook her head. "We're both safe here." As long as her body didn't detect anyone approaching, they would remain the full five minutes. Besides, with the time differential between reality and her memory, it was a pretty safe meeting place. Every minute spent here was about a second outside.

To think she'd just wasted 46 seconds and even attacked her first recruit. She sighed noisily, wasting another two seconds.

Scrapping much of her planned dialogue, she started anew, "I can prove to you that you are a clone." In her hand was the best picture she'd found in the Zzyzx file so far showing Adam Baylin and Charles's father. She handed it to him.

After only a small glance he turned back to her. "How do I know you're not pulling this out of your—"

She interrupted him, knowing full well the word he'd been about to use. Although such language had never offended her before, she found it increasingly offensive since Kyle's death. "Look at it Charles! Don't you see your birthmark there? I know it's in profile, about 77 degrees from a true profile shot of course, but –"

He interrupted her. "I was thinking between 75 and 80 degrees too…"

She resumed, "But you'll notice it's not you. It's your father." When he started looking very closely at the picture, she continued, "The man he's with was Kyle's father."

"Why must I be a clone though? It's mathematically possible that I look identical to my father isn't it?"

"That's wishful thinking Charles. I could show you video stills of the lab where you were made."

"But not video right," he commented.

"With any luck, maybe in a year I could piece something together."

He turned serious and said, "You are joking right?"

Her jaw set and she stood straight. "Dead serious Charles. Kyle and I may not be clones like you, but we were born from artificial wombs when we were sixteen years old. Had the people who had us had their way, we'd still be inside those things."

"Okay, whatever," he said dismissing her. "Why are you here; to mess with me?"

It didn't sound like she was winning over her first recruit and time was quickly running out. "Latnok, the organization your dad works for, tried to kill us both a little more than three months ago." She kept her face solid as steel. "They killed Kyle, and will surely kill you when your experiment is deemed over."

He let out a quick breath from his nose, like a little laugh. "So I'm an experiment now?"

She sighed in frustration. "Here," she shouted. The room dissolved to the scene of a house exploding in the middle of the night. A column of fire erupted from the roof of the home as a topless figure briefly watched the explosion before running away.

Jessi had intentionally put herself between Charles and her memory self. It seemed to work because he never looked back. He stood still, his mouth agape.

She coldly recalled that night. "They sent four people to kill us, two planted the bomb and the others stayed outside to detonate it."

"Where are you?" he asked.

"It's not important."

"Yes it is! How do I know you didn't just dream this up?" he replied.

She growled in response. "I didn't let you see me because I wasn't fully dressed at the time of the attack okay?" She had less than 30 seconds to go.

"Now I have to see!" he exclaimed, looking all around and ignoring the inferno. Not seeing anyone, he said, pointing to the house, "Are you still in there?"

"No, Kyle was." She paused a second then said, "And now he's dead." Sure enough the fire quickly spread throughout the rest of the house once Kyle passed away. The column of fire no longer stood like a beacon and the heat spread evenly throughout the husk that had been their home.

He ignored the flames and the destruction, peering in the dark corners for any sign of her memory self. Thankfully she'd been well hidden.

She muttered to no one in particular. "Grow up already."

Suddenly they were back outside, the five minutes she'd planned as a reasonable recruitment time had elapsed without so much as a hint of having won him over. Now she had to wonder whether she'd have to kill him or somehow maim his brain, making him forget everything about her.

He recovered quickly and had his pocket knife in hand in a fraction of a second. She had his knife in her hand and in her pocket faster.

"Where is it?" he asked. "I just had it."

"I'm debating whether I have to erase your memory. Do you want to plead your case over coffee?" She pointed to the coffee shop everyone seemed to go to here. She couldn't really do what she said, and she certainly didn't want to be killing her potential recruits either, but she needed to stall him to think things through. This had not gone well so far.

As expected he believed she could do just that. "No Jessi, please, let's talk."

"My name's Kessi now." She walked beside him. "Shouldn't you lock your bike?" she asked after they got down the steps.

"It's not mine, I picked the lock." He walked beside her in confidence.