A/N: You don't know how happy I get when I open my inbox and see all those alerts. This chapter was especially exciting for me to write. I hope it's as exciting for you as it was for me!

Enjoy!


Waiting, however, was one of the few things Alyx Vance did not do well.

She tried standing next to the woman on the stretcher, but Kleiner was making no progress and the woman was showing no signs of response to Alyx's repeated endeavours of talking to her. Though she was very concerned for the well-being of their newcomer, she just had to find something with which to occupy herself. Alyx settled for working on the teleporter, which was much easier said than done. Working on said teleporter required her to perch herself precariously on a ladder and hold heavy power tools, which threatened to tilt Alyx off balance and send her face-first onto the lab floor.

But she had made considerable progress already. For one thing, she had reinstalled two of the large metal arms and was working on the third, albeit with a lot of swearing and dropping of bolts.

"Dammit, not again," she grumbled as another bolt escaped her fingers and clattered to the concrete floor below. She descended the ladder to retrieve the small thing and returned again to her perch. Alyx finally secured the arm to the main frame and went to work on some of the smaller parts of the teleporter's interior port. As she stepped inside the port, Alyx noticed the place where she found the woman. She looked around out of habit, then mentally chastised herself for her undue caution.

Alyx, there's no one around, you're just acting paranoid.

She shook her head and stepped across the newcomer's former resting place. Though her foot just touched the place for a split second, Alyx was rooted to the spot. A series of images barraged her mind, but only a few were intelligible. One was an empty, dark laboratory and another was what looked like a scientist working behind a large pair of metal arms. Both images were viewed through what looked like a light blue-tinted material. However, the last horrible image stayed visible longer than the other ones.

The image itself was that of a laboratory in shambles. Computers were knocked off of tables and the lights were flickering wildly. Black and charred lumps lay scattered throughout the lab. Alyx was baffled as to their identity, but one of the lumps stirred and she recognized it as a human wearing the tatters of a lab coat. Along with this last image came a great feeling of triumph and, strangely, a feeling of birth as well.

And, as fast as the phantasms appeared, they were gone.

"What...was that?" Alyx said aloud, finding herself short of breath. Panting, she ran her hands through her hair and tried to calm herself. She tried her hardest to push away the images that threatened to pry their vile way back into her mind. However, the peculiar feeling of triumph remained for a few seconds after the images disappeared. Alyx was confused and scared at the same time. She knew she didn't have these thoughts on her own, something had to have put them there.

But what?

Suddenly, Doctor Kleiner's voice sounded over a frantic beeping noise in the laboratory, jolting her out of her thoughts.

"Alyx...Alyx, please come in here! We have a situation!"

She picked herself up and hurried into the lab. Inside, Dr. Kleiner was hovering nervously the screen of the computer, which was displaying a rapidly spiking and dropping line that Alyx recognized as an impromptu EKG reading. The woman, Alyx noticed, was shivering but otherwise looked okay. As she walked closer to the woman and Kleiner, she could see a second line below the heart rate line on the screen.

"Oh good, Alyx, you're here," Kleiner began, "I was just fiddling around with the wires here and suddenly her heart rate started to skyrocket. Her brain waves also showed up too, which is a good thing. However..." he paused, closely examining the smaller line before turning back to Alyx, "I have never seen brain waves this complex in any human being before. Her brain is abnormally active, which is quite strange."

"Huh," Alyx mused aloud, "that is quite weird. She was unresponsive up until a few minutes ago. I wonder what made her come back to life."

Alyx couldn't help but think that the woman's sudden revival had something to do with Alyx's strange visions in the teleporter. She thought about voicing her strange experience in the teleportation chamber to Doctor Kleiner, but decided against it. She didn't know what he would make of her babbling about her supposed sights.

And besides, Alyx thought, they have nothing to do with what's going on right here, right now. It was some strange energy, that's all.

Alyx absently placed a comforting hand on the woman's trembling arm. The greenish skin was hot, as if she had a fever. But at the moment of contact, the woman immediately became still. Alyx felt as if a veil had been drawn across her field of vision, she lost sight of the lab. Then, her sight slowly came back, but she was looking up at the grey steel girders that made up the ceiling of the laboratory. Alyx looked to her left and caught Kleiner's profile as he still stared at the computer screen and tapping occasionally on keys. Then she shifted her eyes to her right and saw something that terrified her immensely.

It was herself.

She withdrew her hand from the woman's arm and scuttled away from the table, holding her arm as if it had been burned by the woman's hot skin.

Oh God, I really can see through her eyes. How in the world did that happen? Were the visions in the chamber, in fact, hers? Alyx'sthoughts chased each other across her brain like children running for cover from rain. In an uncharacteristic panic, she closed her eyes and covered her face with her hands.

Kleiner, noticing Alyx's sudden recoiling from the table, looked up from the monitor.

"Alyx, what happened? You look as if you've been burned," he moved over to her. Alyx straightened up and sighed. She looked at her hands. They were shaking out of shock.

"It was like I saw through her eyes..." she started, her voice sounding strangely far away, "I saw the lab ceiling, then I saw you, then myself. That was the most frightening part. But the vision ended when I took my hand off of her arm."

Kleiner adjusted his glasses in thought. "Hmm...my only hypothesis is that the electrical impulses coming out of her body are so intense that any contact with her would result in electrical impulses being transmitted to the other, in this case in the form of her sight." He returned to the computer, but instead of typing, he looked down at the woman. Her eyes were moving intensely beneath her eyelids.

Alyx decided to tell him about her previous vision. "And, Doctor Kleiner, that's not the first time that has happened."

"Oh? Please tell me."

"Well, I was in the teleportation chamber and I had dropped a bolt. When I went to pick it up, I happened to stand over the place where I found her," she nodded to the woman on the table, "and I got a strange vision of a laboratory and a giant pair of something that looked like metal arms and then the laboratory was in shambles. And the strangest part of all was that I got this strange feeling. I felt like..." Alyx paused, searching for words, "...like I had just been born. It was a feeling of triumph. This was all before her heart rate showed up on the screen."

Alyx had to shake her head to discourage the wretched memories of the charred scientists and the destroyed laboratory from surfacing in her consciousness again. At this, Kleiner scratched his head.

"So contact isn't necessary, just a place of great energy would provide a vision," he nodded to himself and continued, "and it seems to me like the place in your first vision was the place that our newcomer friend here escaped from. Escaping and leaving total destruction behind is quite a memorable experience, to say the least. And, going by what you said, I daresay..."

But before Kleiner could finish his thought, the woman's heart rate monitor on the computer screen started to beep frantically. Alyx could see that both the heart rate and brain wave measurements of the woman were spiking and falling in great rearing crescendos of green line. And then all at once, the computer calmed again, displaying a slightly elevated but calmer heartbeat, but the same abnormally active brain waves still arced enthusiastically across the bottom of the screen.

This sudden violent activity in the woman's vital signs made Alyx and Kleiner both look down at her. Her face was relaxed for the first time since she was found, making her normally beautiful features appear angelic.

But then, slowly and with with eyelashes fluttering, she opened her eyes to reveal pupils of a vibrant, dangerous, stunning yellow.


A/N: Reviews, je t'aime.