Chapter Seven

"Oh, Sam! There you are!"

Carter, Jacob and O'Neill looked up from their lunch to see Daniel standing over their table in the commissary.

"Hey Daniel, what's up?" She said as he sat down next to Jacob and set his coffee down.

"Oh, I was just looking through some of the college records, and I managed to find a picture of Abby." Daniel said sifting through the papers he had in his hand. He could be so unorganized at times. "Let's see… I have it here somewhere… Ah! There we go." He said, finally pulling out an eight by ten photo print out of a young woman, and handed it to Sam. "It's funny, she looks really familiar, but I just can't-Sam?"

Everyone at the table watched as she took the paper, glanced at it once, and paled several shades.

"Carter?" Jack asked, "What is it?"

Without saying anything, she abruptly jumped up from her chair, dropping the photo on the table face up, and rushed out of the room. They all watched her go, surprised. Jacob reached over and turned the picture to face him: You could see the recognition and realization dawn on his face, as he too paled a few shades, and Jack rose to see what the picture was.

He walked around behind Jacob and looked at it over his shoulder; it was a picture of a girl with dark brown hair, and shocking blue eyes. Carters eyes.

"It's just a girl." He said, but as he said that he noted how the girl looked exactly like a brown haired twenty year old version of Carter, and he thought he might know who it was. That was when Selmac took over.

"This is a picture of Dalia Carter, Samantha's sister."

"Sam never told me she had a sister!" Daniel exclaimed, looking shocked. Jack simply turned and followed Carter out of the room.

He found her in her lab, reading through old police reports on the college's that had lost students. They had descriptions of everyone, but she was only reading through the descriptions of Abby.

"You okay?" he asked, knowing she was aware of him watching her.

"Fine sir."

"What'ca doin'"

"Trying to figure out how I missed this."

"Carter… It's not like they're going to have a little cliff note on there saying 'this girl just happens to look exactly like a brown haired version of Samantha Carter." She shot him a look, and he sobered instantly. "Look, you couldn't have known. There's no possible way you could have known! You're a genius Carter, but you aren't telepathic."

"It's just… I feel like I should have connected the dots. The first recorded incident was the day that Dalia disappeared. Who knows how many other planets she harvested before she decided to try earth, but when she got here, she probably decided she needed a host who knew about the typical college girl, and I should have at least realized that it was a possibility."

"Sam…" She shot him a look that simply stated 'what?' "You couldn't have known. And you can't blame yourself for not figuring it out sooner. It happens. So what have you found?"

"She changes her hair and eye color."

"Sorry?"

"Every time her hair and eye color is different; her eyes usually switch between green and blue, and her hair goes from blond to dark brown and back again. It confused me a bit at first; I was wondering if maybe there where two different girls given the fact that Gou'alds don't generally change their hair color often, but If she's in my sister, it makes sense. It's a disguising technique; we spent enough time talking about that to know."

She watched the quizzical look that crossed his face, and explained. "You might have noticed by the picture, but the family resemblance between us was always incredibly uncanny. People used to think we where identical twins because we looked so similar, even though she was two years older than me. So we started using the things that separated us to get people to stop confusing one for the other. Dalia was the one who liked to change her look a lot, so she dyed her hair brown, and sometimes she would wear green contacts just to add that little bit of difference. She's also nine inches shorter than me; I got my dads height, she got my moms."

"So you're saying that some of Dalia's personality might be leaking out through Aabit?" Jack said, pronouncing her name right due to the seriousness of their conversation.

"No. It doesn't really work that way; with a symbiote it's a one way sort of thing; she'll be able to watch every one of Dalia's memories whenever she chooses to, like watching scenes from a movie, but Dalia can only see the memories that Aabit chooses to share with her, and those memories can be either real, or fabricated. In that same sense, Dalia won't be able to control the situation; she can't hide anything for Aabit, and though she can try to cycle through the same memory over and over again, Aabit will have the main control, kind of like being in the pilots seat versus the co-pilots seat; The pilot can lock you out. And Aabit can close the door on Dalia at any time, and simply... block her out."

"Okay… So why is she changing her hair color?"

"Because she saw how it worked with me and my sister; It gave people a way to discern between the two of them. She obviously doesn't want to turn up at every college looking like the exact same person who had disappeared a few years earlier, so she'll grow her hair out, wear green contacts and heels, or crop it real short and leave it blond."

"So a sort of camouflage."

"In a sense, yes."

"So how are we gonna find her?"

"We look through every Abby or Abigail Thomas at every college in the country, looking at one thing; her picture."

"I'll tell Hammond."