Chapter 5

"Little Fella' needs to go home."

Max jolted awake at the sound of Joshua's voice, blinking in surprise. She had been slumped over in the hospital chair next to Alec's bed, sleeping uneasily, her neck bent at an awkward angle. She rubbed it with her hand, trying to work out the kinks as she focused on Joshua.

"What did you say?" She asked, her voice husky as she wondered how she'd managed to fall asleep. Then again, she'd been awake for four days straight in very upsetting, tense conditions – even shark DNA had its limits.

"Max needs to go back to apartment." Joshua crossed his arms over his chest, looking as if he was fortifying himself for a fight.

He knew her too well.

"No, Joshua!" she said immediately, her voice harsh as she stood from her chair. She winced as her muscles stretched for the first time in what felt like days. "I'm not leaving him—,"

"Joshua will watch Medium Fella' while Max goes home and rests." Joshua's voice was kind but firm, and he even managed to send her a surprisingly strong glare.

"Josh, I have shark DNA," Max argued angrily, crossing her arms over her chest. She took a small step forward, disliking to move even that far away from Alec's bedside. "I don't need any rest."

It was a lie; even though she'd caught enough sleep to last her through the day, her nerves were in tatters and she was becoming more upset and irritable by the minute. But she cocked her hip out to the side and did her best to appear strong and sturdy and tough-as-nails.

Joshua didn't buy it. Max wasn't surprised; he'd always been able to see right through her. "Max doesn't need sleep, but Max needs rest. Joshua will take good care of Alec, and Max will go back home." Joshua's shrewd eyes narrowed as he saw her mouth open to argue. "Max is not fulfilling responsibilities. Little Fella' is needed in Terminal City, especially since everyone is worried about Medium Fella'."

He really did know her too well. He knew just what to say to force her into taking his suggestion seriously, to make her listen. She couldn't decide whether that was comforting or just plain infuriating.

"Fine," she said finally, reluctantly. "I'll go back to my apartment for a little while and then check in with Headquarters. You…" She glanced at Alec, who was still lying lifelessly on the bed, hooked up to all sorts of monitors. "You have to stay with him until I come back, alright?" She hated the pleading in her tone, but she couldn't stop it from slipping through.

Joshua's eyes turned sympathetic, but he just nodded. "Joshua will not leave," he vowed quietly.

Max turned away from him and picked up her jacket, which was resting on her chair. She walked to the open door and stepped halfway through it, pausing to lean her head against the frame as she stood between Alec's room and the hall. She glanced back one more time at his pale face and still lips, and then she forced herself to walk away.

As she took a few steps toward the exit of the building, Max's hypersensitive hearing picked up the deep sound of Joshua's voice.

"Hello, Medium Fella'. Max will be back soon, but Joshua is here now. Don't worry." Max felt tears begin at the corners of her eyes and she quickly blinked them away. They persistently clouded her vision, however, as Joshua continued, "Painted something new today. Max and Alec found paint and canvas and brought them to Joshua two weeks ago, remember? Painting is mostly red, with…."

Max yanked the door open and walked out into the dirty, polluted streets of Terminal City.

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This was pointless.

Max had gone back to her broken-down apartment in TC as promised. First she'd taken a shower, which had been admittedly nice despite the frigid temperature of the water. Then she'd warmed up some canned soup and sat on the old couch in the center of the room, trying to loosen up and "rest."

She'd done no such thing. Her muscles were tense and tightly coiled, she jumped at every little noise she heard, and all the while she felt painfully aware of the fact that Alec could wake up or die or do any number of things while she was sitting in her apartment doing nothing. Eventually she threw her small quilt blanket aside, pulled on a jacket and headed back outside.

From her apartment, she made the short walk to Headquarters and burst through the doors in a whirlwind of energy. She stopped abruptly when she was met with a somber silence; no one was speaking and even the computers seemed to hum more softly than normal.

She stepped forward and a dozen sets of eyes landed on her. From the looks in their eyes, she could tell they were expecting horrible news about Alec. She shook her head and met their gazes in turn.

"He's alright for now. Still not awake, but his vitals are fine and everything."

A collected sigh shivered through the room, and Max almost felt the urge to smile. No one could say Alec wasn't popular around here. He had managed to captivate everyone he'd met just by his liveliness and humor, and now he had the entire city desperately worried because those things had suddenly been stripped away. Max felt strangely comforted by their sorrow, as if being around people who had the same fears as her helped somewhat.

She shook her head to clear her thoughts and headed to her office, calling as she went, "Dix, anything I need to know about?"

"Well, food rations are getting a little low, although they're not at dangerous points yet. The cops are still patrolling the perimeter, but they've made no move to attack, and so far there's been no trouble."

Max nodded and thought about the potential food crisis, her head focusing on something other than Alec for the first time in days. "Alright, we'll arrange a pickup as soon as we can, and make sure to double our rations. I'll work on the strategy right now so that we don't have another nasty run-in with the Sector Police."

She walked inside her office, leaving the door open in case anyone wanted to talk to her. She walked over to her beat-up desk – yet another piece of furniture they'd found in a dumpster – and sat down, pulling a sheet of paper from the drawer. She would write out this plan and do something productive, even if it took her all day. She had to do something other than think of Alec, and the fact that it had been four days and they still had no idea what was going on with him.

She shoved away that frightening thought and stared resolutely down at the paper in front of her, her fingers clenching around the pen in her hand. Food. They needed food, which meant they needed a plan. And it was her job to come up with that plan, so she had to focus.

She began writing, but stopped after a few seconds and brought the pen up to her mouth, absentmindedly biting on the end of it. She furrowed her brows as she struggled to maintain her fragile concentration, but just as she was about to place the pen onto the paper again, a sudden knock sounded from across the room.

Max's eyes shot up and landed on a young woman standing in the arch of the doorway. Her fist tapped nervously on the wooden frame, while her eyes darted around the entire room, looking anywhere but at Max.

"Come in," Max said, secretly glad for the interruption. Yet she also felt the beginnings of worry; the woman looked very anxious. She took a few steps into Max's office, but her blue eyes still refused to meet Max's darker ones and she twirled one strand of light blonde hair around her finger restlessly.

Max was becoming impatient. Perhaps the female realized it, because she finally opened her mouth to speak.

"I wanted to talk to you about…. about Alec." Despite the softly-spoken words, Max's eyes widened and her back went rigid.

"Did someone send you from the infirmary?" Max asked, her voice low as she maintained a carefully blank expression.

"No, no," The girl said quickly, shaking her head. "It's just that…. I've heard people describing his condition – or lack thereof. There's nothing wrong with him, right? He just won't wake up."

Max felt her mask crack just a bit. "Yeah, so?" She said, her tone slightly gruff.

Again the transgenic hesitated, biting on her full bottom lip nervously. "I'm… I know…." She took a deep breath and seemed to change tactics as she said, "My name is Tara. I worked in Psy Ops."

Max felt her heart accelerate at the ominous statement. "So you were one of the ones who screwed with people's minds, huh?" Max asked in a mockingly cavalier tone.

Tara's arching eyebrows scrunched into what could almost be described as a hurt expression. "That's what they made me to do, yes." she said after a moment, her fingers wrapping around each other nervously. "And it's pretty much the only training I've ever had."

Max could believe that. Tara acted nothing like a tough, well-trained soldier. She seemed much too sweet, much too delicate, and much too honest. Still, Max could imagine the number of transgenic minds she'd tampered with in her time at Manticore. Max's eyes narrowed. "What's this got to do with Alec?"

Tara took a deep breath then, her eyes closing briefly. "This… this state he's in? He's gone into it before."

All of the air seemed to evaporate from Max's lungs. She took a deep breath, then another and another, but she couldn't shake the feeling of suffocation. Max's hand still holding the pen began to tremble, and she hurriedly dropped the writing utensil.

When she could find her voice, she said in a very low tone, "Want to run that by me again?"

Tara met Max's gaze at last, her blue eyes cloudy. "I said, he's done this before. Or I think he has; if I could get a look at him, I would be able to know – but they won't let anyone in and I—,"

Max held up a hand, her eyes hot and dangerous, like an incoming hurricane. Tara ceased babbling immediately.

"You're not getting near him until you explain. Thoroughly." she said, each word carefully enunciated. Tara held onto Max's fierce eyes for a bit longer, her jaw dropping slightly. Then she looked away.

"Alright," she said, her voice so soft that Max felt like shaking her. She had no business being fragile and weak when there wasn't anything wrong with her. Her world hadn't been tilted on its side; she wasn't the one lying in a hospital bed with a tube down her throat.

Perhaps Tara was able to read something in Max's expression, because she hurriedly began speaking, her words tumbling one right after the other in jumbled confusion. "I'm basically a human lie-detector. Manticore… I was used to sense whether or not a soldier was withholding something from his or her superiors."

Max's resentment grew exponentially and clawed at her stomach, but she forced herself to put it aside. "Why?" she asked, not entirely successful at keeping the anger out of her tone. "The X series all have accelerated senses – we can tell when a heartbeat increases or a voice rises above its normal octave. We're all pretty much lie-detectors."

Tara shook her head, her blonde hair cascading over her shoulders in waves. "But it's not just changes in the body that I can identify. I can… sense whether or not a person is lying. I can also, to a lesser extent, detect a particular individual's moods and feelings." She paused for a moment, and then added, "And Manticore never fully trusted the X series after your unit escaped. They didn't want to have another X5 sense whether or not one of their unit members was lying. There was a possibility that the other X5's felt the same bonds that your unit did, in which case they wouldn't have reported each other."

Max nearly grimaced; Tara sounded as if she was reading from some Manticore textbook. There was no blind devotion in her tone, but the detailed description of the reasons behind Manticore's actions was sickening all the same.

"I'm telling you this," Tara continued hurriedly, either understanding the look on Max's face or else somehow reading Max's emotions. "Because I want you to know that I was deeply involved in the Reindoctrination process."

A small light bulb went off in Max's head, and her gaze flew to Tara's face. "So you were there when Alec—,"

"Failed his Berrisford mission, yes." Tara finished, her voice steadying slightly as she realized she finally had Max's attention.

The room was silent for a moment, the quiet only broken by the sound of Max rapidly tapping her pen against the paper on her desk. When Tara didn't speak again, Max couldn't restrain herself. "Finish the damn story!"

Tara jerked as if surprised, but continued, "He refused to tell the truth for weeks. I knew he was lying, but he was too stubborn to give in. Eventually we got it out of him; we found out that he loved—,"

"Got it out of him by torturing him, you mean!" Max said, jumping out of her chair. She ran her fingers through her hair and then began to pace, but her anger wouldn't be quelled that easily. "There better be a point to this. I don't want to hear all of the horrible things you did to him in Psy Ops."

"I did what they told me to do, or I would have ended up just like all the soldiers they sent my way!" Tara spat, her voice sounding harsher and more determined than Max had heard it throughout their entire conversation. "You're forgetting, Max, that you weren't there. You think the psychics weren't punished for not following orders just because we were trained for Psy Ops instead of field work and infiltration?"

Max was slightly taken aback. She stopped pacing for a moment and turned to Tara, whose posture was both fearful and stubborn all at once.

"Alright, alright," Max said grudgingly after a moment, noting the way Tara's breathing had become labored and rough. "I get it; still under Manticore's thumb." She reluctantly softened her voice a bit and added, "Go ahead and continue."

Tara took a deep breath, the fire draining from her eyes somewhat. "I… well, like I said, it was weeks before he actually told us the truth." She paused, wisely leaving out all that had been done to him in that time. "Once Manticore realized what had happened, that he had become attached to the Berrisford girl, they put him through a lot of vicious tests to try to eliminate the chances of it happening again."

Max swallowed back her revulsion, imagining what it must have been like. Knowing Manticore, they would have wanted to punish him, force him to submit to their will. And he endured these "tests" for weeks, if not months.

"He kept calling her name. After we'd broken him enough to understand where he'd gone wrong, he wouldn't let go. They did so many things to him…" Tara seemed to shudder, and her eyes filled with shadows. Max softened toward the girl a little, realizing she at least shared some of Max's disgust.

Max cleared her throat after a moment, pulling them both from their dark thoughts. "Why didn't they just make him forget?"

Tara glanced up, surprised. "Because they can't." At Max's frown, she added, "Manticore never invented the technology to remove memories. They could have used one of the Telecoercionists, but even in those cases, memories sometimes return. No, what Manticore normally did was… damage the transgenic, both physically and mentally, until he or she broke down and reentered the system. Or, if the transgenic was difficult like Alec, they would use the laser, which would eventually cause the transgenics to force themselves into forgetting specific events. They had already been taught to do so if they were ever caught or captured, so Manticore used that training to their advantage."

Again, Max noted the clinical way in which Tara described Manticore's actions and motives. It was chilling, but then Tara had probably picked up all of this information with her strange abilities.

"So, is that what happened?" Max asked after a moment. "They forced Alec to make himself forget about Rachel, and then put him back into training?"

Tara shook her head, a puzzled expression on her face. "That's what Manticore had been trying to do, but no. They used the laser for a few weeks, but he still called her name in his sleep. The upper officials were just about to have him terminated when he slipped into a coma while he was lying on his cot."

Max looked at her sharply, realizing that they were finally reaching the heart of the matter. "And?" she demanded, her voice barely more than a whisper.

"And the people in charge kept him around, worried that something like that would happen to the others; they wanted to figure out the problem before they disposed of him."

Max's mind worked furiously. "But he obviously recovered, didn't he?"

Tara said slowly, "Well, by then, they had pretty much already signed his termination papers. But… something happened."

Max breathed in sharply and then snapped, "What?"

"He woke up." Tara said simply. "He woke up, and he didn't remember anything." She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and Max sent her an impatient and uncomprehending look. "He didn't just forget the mission, Max. He forgot everything. He forgot every assignment he'd ever been on, he forgot his unit-mates – everything. The only information he'd retained was his designation and the training he had received for most of his life."

Max's mouth suddenly felt very dry, and she licked at her parched lips. "So he remembered being a soldier, but somehow got rid of everything else?"

"Yes," Tara said, her hands twitching nervously once more. "But it was more than that. He changed, too. Before the Berrisford mission, he was…. quiet. And he had this look about him that indicated to innocence… naivety, even. But afterwards... he wasn't innocent at all. He was suggestive and talkative and he ran scams all the time, despite—,"

"He was Alec," Max said, gaping at Tara. Max didn't want to accept the information, but her mind was already forming one conclusion; Alec had somehow forced himself to forget the pain and the anguish, and he had lost himself as a result. And if he had done the same thing this time…

Max opened her mouth and closed it a few times, at a loss. Tara still stood awkwardly on spot, Max never having asked her to sit down. The two women stared at each other for a moment, dark brown eyes meeting crystal blue ones, until a loud sound pulled them both out of their thoughts.

The sound of running feet followed the noise and drifted in from Max's open door, and a second later one of the X7 medics appeared. She was young, not much older than 16, and her pretty face was pale and covered with a light sheen of sweat.

"What is it?" Max asked, taking a few hurried steps forward.

"Max," the medic gasped, her eyes wide, "He woke up. He's—,"

Max jolted by the girl without waiting for her to finish her sentence, her pace a heavy run.

"Wait, Max! There's something—!"

Max was already out of the doors, the cold temperature stinging her skin as she ran toward the medical center. Her heart pounded rapidly, the sound filling her ears and drowning everything else out. She moved as quickly as she could, but it didn't seem to be fast enough. She felt anticipation roll over her; she desperately wanted to see his smile and hear his laugh for the first time in what felt like years.

She burst into to infirmary, a whirlwind of energy flowing through her as she brushed past Cam and the entire medical staff. She walked into his room, her legs so unsteady she was worried she wouldn't make it.

But she did, and there he was. His sleepy green eyes glanced at her, still hazy and groggy as a result of the coma. He was still pale and lifeless, but his hands were moving and most of the medical tubes and wires had been removed.

She stood rooted to spot for a moment, unable to believe it. She feared this was a dream or else some cruel joke, and she would soon realize that Alec wasn't back. That he was still in his unconscious state, that she'd never see him awake like this.

When he didn't disappear and she didn't wake up, she took a hesitant step forward, her hand outstretched as if to touch him. But even as she neared him, she thought she noticed something odd in his eyes. There was no flash of recognition, no joy or happiness at the sight of her. He'd told her he loved her before he'd gone into the coma, so his almost unfeeling reaction toward her now was strange.

"Alec?" she said, her voice hoarse. She took a few steps forward and her fingers collided with his, which were resting lightly on his stomach. She gripped his hand tightly, reassuring herself through touch that he was really alive and awake. He frowned as if confused and made no move to encircle her hand with his own.

"Alec? Say something." Her tone was thick with fear and longing. His frown deepened and he moved his hand out from under hers.

"My designation's 494."

End of Chapter 5

A/N: -Ducks tomatoes- No! Don't hate me yet! Well, okay, that was evil. But you trust me, right? Heh. Oh, and thank you all for the reviews! They really do help to inspire me.