Max gasped as the flash from Jennifer Madison hit him. He tried not to gasp or give any sign of the sudden sensory overload, and to make sense of what he was seeing as much as possible. The old lady - it had to be the old lady that the guy in the nightclub in Dallas had told them about, smiling - and standing on the stairs near the front door of the Madison house, right where Max and Liz had entered. A picture of a blonde girl, possibly Jennifer herself, around eleven or so, lying horribly hurt on a stretch of rough concrete. No one single wound on her body, like a gunshot or a knife entry... but almost all of her limbs broken, bleeding in several places, and her head - well, something looked very bad about the little girl's head, but Max couldn't tell what immediately. Then, another image of the girl from the same age, perfectly healthy and whole - and looking at a glowing silver handprint on her stomach. She quickly rearranged her shirt to cover the mark and hurried out to join a bunch of other kids, in front of... of a building that seemed familiar to Max, vaguely, though he couldn't immediately place it. Jennifer again, in her late teens or just over twenty, talking and flirting with a younger guy, definitely still in his teens, on a college campus.

And then, the images stopped, and Max tried to readjust. He... he was sitting on the couch, with Liz right next to him. "So how did you meet Jason?" she asked.

"Well, it's a bit weird that you don't know, or that we never met while he was at school," Jennifer said, seeming a bit nonplussed. Had she felt any of what he was seeing in the flash? Had she seen something of him, too? "I... I met Jason while he was still in high school, I was a few years ahead of him and going to U Pittsburgh at the time."

"Right, he grew up there in Pittsburgh," Max said. He actually knew that from the biographical info they'd read, but it was so hard to keep up and sound like all of this was incredibly familiar to him. "And so - you guys saw each other long distance once he went off to Notre Dame, and you were back in Pennsylvania."

"Right," Jenn replied, sounding even more suspicious now. "And... and after I graduated, I had a simple job doing filing for a company there in Pittsburgh - until he graduated, and got a job offer down here in Louisville." She smiled a bit at the memory. "He asked me to marry him then, and we moved down here together." She sighed. "I was over to Indiana quite a few times, and I made a bunch of his friends, but I really can't place you, 'Bill.'"

Max squeezed Liz's hand, hoping that she'd get the message. He had - well, he had about as much as he thought that he'd get from Jennifer, just from the flash and a few other things that she'd dropped in conversation. The plot was starting to fall into place - but he needed to get out of here, well out of Louisville before Robert and Jennifer found out that 'Bill' and 'Anna' weren't who they seemed - and before they could tell the old lady. For a second Max thought about coming clean about whom they really were, but he couldn't risk it. The old lady, the shape-shifter... Jennifer definitely knew her, and probably knew her secret - she was definitely an alien, and if she were definitely a friendly alien, then Max could feel confident about laying his cards out on the table. But if there was any chance that she was an enemy, maybe even in Kivar's pay - no. Liz squeezed back, and he hoped that she understood.

All of a sudden, Max's phone rang. Puzzled, he pulled it out - and it was Mister Valenti. Was this a warning of some kind of trouble, or had they just been able to figure out somehow that Max needed an excuse to leave him in a hurry and called him so that he could make up one as he pleased. So Max pulled it out, and got into a very heated one-sided argument with Valenti, who didn't really bother arguing back. "Well, I'm afraid lunch is off," he said to Liz (Anna) and Jennifer regretfully. "That was my boss' boss - something went wrong with -" Umm, what the heck could it be? "With the service level numbers; I'm supposed to get to an internet cafe for a teleconference tout de suite."

"You can probably plug a laptop into our high-speed switcher," Jennifer volunteered uncertainly.

"No, thanks, that's sweet, but it's better to do this by the book," Liz said. "Nice to meet you and all, and please send our regrets to Jason." She and Max made their exit quickly, and hurried back up the walk, passing Jennifer's son, who was passing them by, waving with a little hand and hurrying off to say hi to his Mommy. Liz suddenly reached out her hand to ruffle the boy's pale gold hair as the two of them came near - and she stumbled hard, Max catching her so that she didn't land on the front walk paving.

"Flash?" he whispered to her. Liz nodded. "Okay, wait until we're off."

Liz nodded. Together, they turned at the sidewalk, and Jennifer wasn't looking out at them, so Max figured it wasn't worth the trouble of walking past the van and out of sight. "Wow, what happened?" Ava asked. "I... I could tell that you were done already, but..."

"Drive," Max said. "And, and call the others, have them leave. No time to worry about rendezvous, we just all need to get out of town as soon as possible." He gave Liz a hand inside, panting. "Let's head for Pittsburgh, whichever way that is."

"Pittsburgh?" Liz repeated, as Rath put the car in gear and screamed away. "Because... because that's where Jennifer and Jason met?"

"Not - not just that," Max insisted. "There... there was a place I saw in the flash I got from Jennifer. I'm pretty sure that that was in Pittsburgh too." He took a deep breath. "Liz... Jennifer nearly died - when she was eleven or twelve. There... there was a field trip, I don't know all the details, but she fell from a great height. And - and an alien..."

"Saved her life," Liz breathed, seeing it. "Was there a handprint on her in the flash?" Surprised, Max nodded. "Presumably, that's the she-shifter that we're looking for. Call... call her Shana, just for the sake of convenience."

"Catchy," Ava told her. "Okay, so Shana saves her life, and... and now she's posing as Jenni's mother?" Max nodded. "And mind-warping Jenni's husband, at least once, to cover something - possibly something she did at Jason's company."

"Right," Max agreed. "The field trip was... was at a museum in Pittsburgh, I think. Want to look up a picture of it somehow, to make sure, but..."

"Alex can stop at a net cafe, the next big town that we come to," Jim suggested. "Which probably won't be until Cincinnati."

"Fine by me," Max told him. Liz giggled, and Max chuckled too, when he remembered that he'd told Jenni he had to go to an internet cafe. "Well, between the museum, and Jenni going to the university at Pittsburgh..."

"We still have an even slimmer lead to dig up than we did here in Louisville, looking for Shana," Rath pointed out. "That's pretty much nothing."

"Unless," Liz chimed in. "Jenn is probably going to mention her visitors to Jason, and they'll compare notes, Jason will probably connect you talking to Jenni with your visit to him at his office, Max," Liz put in. "And he'll know that you were trying to find Jenni's 'mother' - Shana. She'll probably tell Shana about us, if she has any way to get a message to her... and Shana might come looking for us. Pittsburgh is about as likely a place as anywhere for her to try to intercept us. She'll know that we know that Jason and Jenni met there."

"Oh, that's a reassuring thought, Liz," Rath put in. "We don't need to know where to look for this alien shape-shifter, a possible enemy, because she'll be looking for us." Liz shrugged, a mix of apology and insolence in the gesture.

"Well, it is a good point," Max decided reluctantly. "One more thing we have to worry about - and a possible opportunity. Shana might not be an enemy, or if she is we might be able to get the upper hand on her, if we're careful and keep good watch, and then we might be able to find out some useful stuff."

"Yeah, 'cause driving all day and all night really lends itself to keeping good watch," Ava pointed out.

"Maybe we shouldn't be driving all day and all night until we get to Pittsburgh, then," Liz suggested. "We could find someplace to stay put halfway - near Columbus maybe - and have a bit longer of a rest break."

"It's an idea," Max decided. "Of course, a few people are going to have to stay up and keep watch even then, but every little bit helps."

Jim Valenti hung up his cell phone. "They're on their way, ahead of us and nearly back to the interstate," he reported. "Any possible pursuit we should really be worried about at this point?"

Max thought. "Doesn't seem likely I suppose - but eyes open couldn't hurt." He sighed and tried to turn around and scan the traffic behind them. Liz leaned in close, her side pressing warmly against his.

"Okay, I have a question," Valenti announced. "You might none of you be able to answer it, but here goes anyway. Can alien shape-shifter go, erm, across genders, or can a male shape-shifter only go into men, or boys possibly, and vice versa?"

There was a long silence. "Our protector was only dudes as far I knew," Rath said, "but we never saw much of him."

Ava sighed. "Tess might have known more, but she's not available."

Max cleared his throat. "Actually, Tess told me some stuff about growing up with Nasedo last spring - while she was making a concerted effort to seduce my confidence." He sighed. "The information isn't one hundred percent wholly dependable, I guess, but I don't really see any reason she'd have fibbed on this subject." He sighed.

Before Max could continue, Liz mentioned, "Somehow I don't really see 'fib' as the right word for Tess deceiving you about anything. Maybe just because it implies an inexperienced or infrequent liar."

"Rrrowr," Ava teased Liz playfully, and Liz blushed slightly, knowing that Ava didn't have much affection for her identical worser half, and if Ava thought she was being even a little catty, she'd probably gone too far.

"Well anyway, what did the Tess monster have to say?" Rath asked, hardly bothering to mask his laughter. "About Ed going around as a woman."

"He'd done it once or twice - a woman's face and hair, at least. But he seemed to have more trouble with a woman's body type, because he'd wear a heavy, shapeless trench-coat or something that didn't show off a figure when he was doing it. He didn't have the same problem becoming skinny or muscular or fat, as a guy."

"Hmm, that's interesting," Valenti said. "You'd think that a woman's body type would be easier than the face."

"Oh, I don't know," Rath countered. "First, practice. If he'd mimicked a bunch of different guy heads, there wouldn't be much in the way of a chick's face that wouldn't prepare him for. Second, maybe it's just easier for shape-shifters to pick up faces in general."

"Third," Ava chimed in, "you can get better feedback on your face, using any kind of simple mirror. Maybe put the picture of who you want to be right up against the mirror for comparison."

"Well, whatever," Liz said, sighing. "I'm a bit depressed now. Is there any chocolate here in the van?"

"Umm, here," Ava said, picking up a package and tossing it over to Liz - honey filled chocolate balls. "Don't pig out too much though - there's Maxxie boy to think about."

Max, Liz, and Rath all started chuckling at once, remembering the conversation last night that had started in the van when Liz had been eating pizza. Jim shot a look over at Ava, who just shrugged, puzzled but not worrying about it terribly much.

#

An hour and seventeen miles later, Max sighed to himself. The van was still rolling northeast along the interstate, towards Ohio. It was hard for him to grasp how far they'd travelled in less than thirty-six hours. They'd started in the extreme south south-west, and were on their way to cross over from the last of the mid-southern states, (since Kentucky wasn't really that far south, the shallow south perhaps,) into the Midwest. They had crossed nearly half the breadth of the country already, or at least so it seemed.

Ava was driving up front now, but she hadn't taken the wheel before giving the back of the van a bit of a makeover to encourage a slightly homier feeling. Some old blankets had been found in a storage compartment beneath the seats, and these had been hung up against the side windows towards the back to keep too much daylight getting in to allow people to rest, and between the various seats in order to add to a sense of privacy, (although the effect was somewhat lessened by the holes that had to be cut out to make sure that the driver could still see at least a little bit through the rear view mirror.) Rath and Mister Valenti were at opposite ends of the very back seat, probably sleeping. Max and Liz were taking the middle, which didn't allow them much space and forced their bodies closely together, but neither was complaining about that. It's all about liking the company, he decided to himself.

"Okay, we're starting to figure out what the story about the girl in the supply closet was about," Max whispered softly to his girl, "though there's still a lot that remains unanswered. I still wonder what that flash of your granny means. It doesn't seem to have any possible connection, and yet I wonder."

"Hmm, yeah, I don't see anything yet," Liz admitted. "Oh, one clue I forgot to tell you about. When I..."

"When you touched the little kid, Jason and Jenni's son, you had a flash," Max filled in. "I could hardly miss the signs. What was it of?"

"Umm... the redheaded girl and Jenni, while she was pregnant," Liz filled in slowly. "Shana, I guess. She gave Jenni a hypodermic needle injection, and waved her hand over her belly, and, umm... I'm not sure of the details, but something that Jenni had to be up in the stirrups for." Max blinked, surprised. "And... and there were words somewhere... maybe on the wall, or - I'm not quite sure. But they read 'Brazel W institute.'"

"Brazel?" Max repeated. "Dammit, I know I should recognize that... that name, but I don't." He sighed. "Was that it?"

"Umm... no, that's not quite all." Liz sighed. "Something... there was something that was hard to make out, but oddly familiar. A view of cells, like in a microscope. Cells that were nearly human, but not quite. Closer than yours, though."

"Huh?" Max tried to fit this one in. "So... so Jenni's son... is part alien? Shana changed his cellular structure while he was still unborn?"

"That's... that's what it seems like to me," Liz admitted. "I - I wonder what reason she might have had."

Max shrugged, and leaned ever closer to Liz. "Okay, that's enough about Jenni and her wacky alien friends." Liz laughed. Max kissed her, and reached out to gently stroke his hand against her right breast. Liz broke the kiss, startled, and looked around, as if expecting that someone would be able to see them.

"Oh, Max Evans, you're naughty," she said, so quiet that there was hardly any sound to the words, and Max understood the mostly by the way her lips were moving.

"I didn't think I was the only one," he mouthed, but from the look on Liz's face, she hadn't been able to quite understand all of that. So Max repeated, moving his lips against the skin of her neck not far from her left ear, and letting the sound pass from his lips through her skin, not the air. Liz's giggle sounded very loud to Max, and when he pulled back slightly he could see that she was grinning. Liz's hand ran over Max's own chest, not tarrying long, though she did make a point of scratching over the stretch of shirt that she knew covered one nipple, and then her attention went further down. Not to the point of interest that was already starting to swell, but her hand cupped the curve of Max's narrow hip, then reaching around him to fondle and poke his butt.

"You... you have a delicious looking ass," Liz whispered to him ever so softly. "And it feels damn good, too."

Max hesitated. He had been the one to start this, but now he wasn't sure how far he wanted to take it - Ava was just up ahead, driving, probably very bored and keeping her ears open for anything interesting going on further back in the van. Rath and Mister Valenti might be awake too. It would be embarrassing to try to do anything really pleasing in these circumstances, and Max wasn't sure how far he and Liz could stand to tease each other without getting down to real business... or how frustrating it might be to get caught in between. But Liz raised the stakes without even asking him. When Max clued in to what had happened, Liz was climbing into his lap, a hand reaching behind her to run fingers through Max's hair, her smooth and rounded butt pressing hard against his stiffly trapped rod. "Ohh..." He couldn't even try to stifle the groan until it had already burst through his lips. "What... what about your seat belt, Liz?"

"Umm..." She spoke low, though not as low as he did because her face was away from him now. "I... I could put yours around me too."

"Umm... that might not be the best of ideas," Max mumbled. He was probably getting too uptight. They didn't worry about being strapped into seatbelts in the motor home, partly because it didn't really have any. But then all thoughts of auto safety were driven out of Max's head as Liz took his arm in her hand and brought it close to her, and then... Max couldn't really see how she did it, though he supposed the details weren't that surprising and didn't matter. The upshot was that Liz had led his hand up under her shirt, and his fingers were brushing against the underside of her trim but luscious bosom, and the soft fabric of the bra that was attempting to further restrain it under her shirt. Max bit on the edge of his tongue to keep from crying out. Liz made a softly hushed mumble, and he realized that she was doing something very similar. Her butt was still nearly gyrating back and forth on top of his hips and thighs. Max's hand pushed deeper into the front of Liz's shirt seemingly of its own accord, clutching the tender sensitive flesh, not terribly hard but forcefully enough that Liz felt the contact in a shudder that went all over her body, fingers repeatedly stroking back and forth along a volcanically developing peak on the furthest point of her contoured rolling hills.

Liz's left hand was stroking Max's leg now. "Either... either we have to stop now," Max hissed urgently at her. "Or... or I get to fuck the stuffing out of you right here and now."

"Hmm..." Liz thought about that, turned around to smile at him slightly, and Max could tell in her smile that something good was going to be coming. However, what happened first seemed very disappointing, as Liz stood partly up, holding the blanket in front of them just enough to support her without yanking it down, and got back into the seat next to Max, pulling her seat belt around her lovely body again and snapping the head into its sheath securely. (Darnit, Max was so turned on that he was even starting to see a seat belt fastener in sexual terms... the part attached to the belt being male, and the part that came out of the seat itself being female. Ohhh...) Then Liz reached out for his hand again, bringing it to the side of her face, so his thumb brushed her cheek and his fingers were in her hair. "Concentrate," she said, the single word pronounced out loud, so that it almost startled Max. Of course, it didn't really matter if anyone else heard that, it wasn't dirty or suggestive by itself.

Max tried to think hard, but he wasn't sure what he should be thinking about. Liz got a frustrated look on her face, and Max felt disappointed that he was letting her down, and then wham - a flash hit him. It was... it was the two of them sitting next to each other like they were, but not in a car, belted in. They were... they were on the edge of the bed in the motel room, back in Roswell. In the flash, Liz got back up again quickly, pulled Max's shirt off, and started to plant a line of kisses down the middle of his chest, her hair brushing against his bare skin and her legs pressing slightly against his own. Once she'd gotten down just past his belly button, nearly to his waist, Liz reached out with her hand, caressed a hard bulge underneath his jeans, and started up near his collarbone again, kissing down a second string, this time going straight over his excited nubbin. When the second string of kisses against Max's torso came to an end, she fondled his crotch briefly again, this time slipping her hand down in between Max's jeans and his underpants, and kissed him hotly, mouth to mouth, her nimble tongue playing with his and letting itself get tagged. Then she backed away just slightly, her sweet breath hitting Max's face - and that was where the flash ended. Max was so turned on he nearly wanted to scream, but he was impressed with Liz's idea. Sex, or sex-play at least, via flash. He forced himself to calm down and breathe deeply as well as he could, formulated a fantasy that he hoped that Liz would like, and reached out again to send it back to her.

Liz gasped in excitement, and Max wondered if he'd let out a noise without even realizing it as the flash hit him too. Oh well, he didn't care that much about disturbing the others. He couldn't see the details of what was going on in his own flash, which was a little disappointing, since it was one that he'd have loved to experience in full detail at least as much as Liz would be enjoying it. But, since he'd originated the flash, he knew that he was reaching out, stroking and caressing Liz as he took off her own shirt and her bra, gently pinching the tips of her bare breasts, and sucking even more delicately on her sweet skin. Liz opened her eyes, stared right at him, and he could see that her pupils were dilating slightly, her stare was hot and aimed so tightly at him that he could almost feel scorch marks. "Alright, try this."

They started to send more and more explicit imagery back... and Max felt oddly as if there were two Maxes and two Lizzes - linked by mental connections so that the two of them here in the car could feel everything that their imaginary counterparts did in the motel room. More and more clothes were stripped away, lips were put to use in inventive and exciting places, and eventually they sent three different flashes back and forth of full-on sexual congress - with Liz on top of Max. Max opened his eyes after one of these flashes with a wet, clammy feeling spreading through his undershorts, and the stiff rod in his crotch starting to relax slightly - he knew that he was done, and well satisfied with it. But Liz obviously hadn't gotten off herself yet, and hopefully one really good burst would do it. Of course, just because Max didn't really have a stiff and solid cock to give her, that didn't mean that his alter-ego wasn't still up to the task. (Handy benefit of this routine!) He heard Liz yell out piercingly in the fantasy, and let out a much softer cry in reality, and felt her convulsing on top of him, then collapse and snuggle close to him... both on the bed, and on the car seat.

"Is there going to be a gas stop soon?" Liz called out loud. "Max and I both kinda need to, umm, go to the bathroom."

#

"Hmm," Alex said, nodding at Max. "We need to find a big, famous art history museum in Pittsburgh? I... I don't know about it myself, but if you're on target, it shouldn't take too long to figure out what its name is from the net - and get a picture." He sighed. "Once we get to somewhere that we can get on the net from."

"Cool," Liz decided. The cars had both stopped for pizza near the middle of nowhere... except that this particular roadside pizza establishment was apparently as popular and impressive as to almost qualify as 'somewhere' all by itself. There had been a turnoff to a parking lot on one side of the highway, and at the corner of the parking lot the entrance to a passenger bridge built over the highway - they had climbed several flights of stairs, walked across and looked out through glass walls at the cars zooming each way down the interstate. On the other side, the bridge led onto a wide field of picnic tables, and on the other end of the field was the bakery and customer service center, and then there was a rather smaller parking lot. Max wasn't sure for the disparity in the sizes of the parking lot... possibly a lot more people stopped here for pizza when going northeast than southwest, just because that way they got to walk over the bridge.

"Did you find anything else interesting in the material you downloaded from the office network, Alex?" Jim Valenti asked. To make up for having been stuck in different vehicles on the drive out of Louisville, he and Amy were eating with one arm around each other, which was something Max hadn't even thought of with Liz, no matter how close they were lately. Food was something he still felt he needed two hands to deal with usually.

"Umm, yeah, kinduv," Alex admitted, looking over at Isabel sitting next to him and then at his slice with pepperoni, Canadian bacon and olives. "The company does a lot of work in telecommunications, especially cellular phone networks. Repairing transceiver towers, helping to build new ones; that kind of thing. They would have some limited access to national communication lines, and that's probably the most important reason why a... why 'Shana' would be interested in them. But I'm not sure this helps us track her down any."

"We could look for other important companies or sites to do with telecom in other cities," Isabel pointed out. "Like in Pittsburgh."

"Alright," Max agreed. "Now, does anybody know why the name Brazel would be familiar to me?"

"You're joking, right?" Michael asked. Max turned to him. "Sheesh, all that time working at the museum and you can't keep the basic facts about the Roswell crash in your head? Mac Brazel was the rancher who first reported debris from a crash to the air force."

"Oh, my god," Max muttered. "How could I have missed that connection? William W Brazel. The Brazel W Institute." He sighed. "But still, it doesn't entirely make sense. Who would name... some sort of a medical institute after Brazel, and - and experiment in making the unborn children of human parents partially alien?"

"Whaa?" Maria asked. "Max, sorry, you've lost us badly. Go back and do the catch-up thing?" So, between them, Max and Liz rehashed the flash that Liz had seen touching the little kid in the Madison's front yard, about Jenni getting an injection while she was pregnant and other stuff, and a view of partially alien cells.

"That... that's not a lot to go on for such big assumptions," Isabel commented. Max looked up at her. "Just saying - I mean, I thought that Laurie was an alien when I first touched her and got a flash."

"Heih?" Laurie commented in a nasal interrogative. "You... you did?" She tried to cast her mind back through those traumatic weeks. "When... when you and Max and Jim first found me and dug me up?"

"Yeah," Isabel asserted. "You... you thanked me for saving your life... I'm glad I helped, though I can't take all the credit." Laurie smiled. "But... but what I saw in the flash wasn't you, it was the aliens that were after you. The Gandarium parasites. Liz, you might be misunderstanding what you saw the same way."

"Yeah," Liz agreed. "But can you think of another interpretation? I'm just rolling with the only thing I've got at the moment." There was an awkward silence after that.

"Well," Alex suggested, "we need to find more information about the Brazel W Institute, like where it is and maybe who's involved in it, and all the signs point to it not being something I can just look up easily on Google. So, well, who do we know who might know?"

"I... I have a contact, of some sort," Max said, smiling. "Hope that he wasn't hurt when Kivar blew through Roswell, and that I can get in touch without giving away our location."

"Right," Liz agreed. "By the way, guys, Lonnie called Rath back about half an hour ago." Everybody who had been in the motor home reacted to this news with surprise and relatively little positive enthusiasm.

"How... what did she say?" Kyle asked.

"Not - not too much," Rath answered. "I did most of the talking, telling her the situation and roughly what we were about. Then - well, she said thanks and just hung up. I admit I was a little surprised not to get more of a reaction out of her."

"Do you think something might have happened to her?" Isabel asked, a grudging concern underlying her words.

"Maybe, but I doubt it. Probably she's still steamed at me for throwing in with you guys... or she wanted to think of her own move without me bugging her." Rath shrugged. "I've told her what's what, at least."

"How... how much did you tell her about where we were and where we'd be going?" Alex asked. Rath made a bit of a face at him. "That much, huh?"

"She knows enough that she could meet up with us if she wants. In fact..." Rath looked over at Ava. "Our route to Pittsburgh takes us through Columbus, right?"

"Yeah, wh- ohh." Ava nodded. "Did you tell her - yeah, I actually remember that now. You mentioned the name of that dive where we ran into each other in Columbus. She can probably find it. Which means - she might wait there as a way of leaving things up to us. If we stop and go in there, then it's a signal that we'd be interested in having her join up - if she's there too. If we don't want to worry about her, then we stop in any joint we want to in Columbus but that one."

"And... and she can probably reach Columbus before we get there," Rath agreed. "She said she was in Buffalo - what she'd be doing there I don't know. But that sort of implied deal is the way her mind works. Nothing said out loud."

"Well, I guess you'd know a lot about how Lonnie's mind works," Amy said pointedly. "Considering some of the dirty deeds you pulled off together. Is there any reason why we should take someone like that with us?"

There was a long silence in reply to that - not even Rath tried to argue in Lonnie's defence... but he seemed faintly defiant even in his silence. "Well, come on, let's finish eating up and head for Cincinnati," Max said. "I... I think I have a notion about how to get a message to Brody asking about this institute, but we'll need email for that, not just a cell phone."

"I think I might be able to get you email through a cell phone," Alex replied. "If I can find an eight hundred number for my dial-up internet service."

"Let me guess," Jim replied. "You got a cellular modem along with all that other stuff in Abilene?"

"Yeah, didn't seem like it was worth the trouble to get it set up before," the young computer whiz replied. "Frankly I half forgot about it. But it seemed like it just might be useful."

"Okay, then I'll be in the motor-home for the next leg with Alex and the laptop, Max said. Rath, Ava, are you guys okay for staying in the van?" They agreed that they were, along with Jim, and Amy. Maria and Kyle volunteered for driving the motor-home, and Michael said that he'd try to catch some z's in the sleeping chamber. Everyone seemed pretty satisfied with that arrangement.

As they were clearing the table to throw the empty pizza boxes and paper plates and coke cans away (or toss them into recycling bins, as appropriate,) Kyle reached out for a folded piece of paper, looked curiously at it, and then tossed it away as if it were hot. "What is it?" Ava asked.

"Who... who put this there?" he asked. Several of his friends traded glances, but nobody said anything or made a gesture of accepting responsibility. "Somebody... somebody, I dearly hope, was playing a joke on me, and I want them to admit to it right now!"

More bemused looks. Ava and Liz, who had been the ones next to Kyle, both quietly said 'not me' or 'not I', and Michael shook his head. "Umm... do you mind?" Max asked, reaching out for the paper himself. Kyle seemed much too shaken to reply, so Max felt he was justified in examining the item in question, purely with a view to resolving the issue that seemed to be upsetting him so much, of course. No element of insensitive curiosity played on his mind.

The paper was probably a sheet of eight and a half by eleven typing paper, carefully folded into one eighth of its usual size so that it didn't take up much area, and was reasonably thick as a packet. On one of the exposed sections, in a slightly showy and girlish script, was printed the following:

Astro-mail

To: Kyle Adam Valenti

From: Tess

Personal information. Do not forward blind. Do not read except at addressee's direction.

"Whoa," Max muttered. He could certainly understand why Kyle might be upset at even the thought that Tess was contacting him. Max would feel the same. And it was certainly an odd device. If Tess had originated this, how had she gotten it here? Where had the physical paper come from?

"If... if I'd done this, I'd tell you so," Max admitted. "At least, if I remembered doing it. I... I think I can say the same for everyone here." He left the other alternative unspoken.

"Before, before we found out," Kyle choked out, "The - well, the way things went down, I never expected that she'd still take me up on it." He groaned. "I - I don't really want to open and read it."

"Hmm?" Rath had apparently read the header information over Max's shoulder. "Well, I can torch it for you if you want. That'd solve the problem. Although she might try again, I don't know if there's any way to stop that. I wouldn't have thought she'd be able to do it at all."

"No, no, don't destroy it," Kyle insisted. "That... well, that was only part of the truth; that I didn't want to read it. Part of me does... and part of me doesn't want to not read it." Liz stepped up and put her hand in Kyle's, a very supportive friendly gesture. "Maybe I'll just keep it for a while until I'm ready. Or - or maybe I should just do it now and get it over with."

"What... whatever you want to do," Liz insisted. Ava had a very conflicted look on her face, like she was dying to give Kyle a friendly hug and wasn't sure if he'd push her away because her resemblance to Tess would just confuse his already tormented emotions further. "But... but, with all due sympathy to what you're going through, we should probably get going if you're not going to read it just this second."

"I... I can keep Maria company as she drives," Michael said. "You don't need to worry about keeping your eyes on the road at the same time as you're angsting about this." Everybody seemed to have figured out the basics of what the note entailed by now.

"Umm... thanks, but I'm doing it now," Kyle suddenly decided. Quickly he opened up the paper and read through it. Not much time passed, but every second seemed like at least a minute to the people who were watching Kyle's eyes scan the paper. "All right." He folded it up, just once, and started to lead the way back to the pedestrian bridge.

The table had all been cleared, so Max shrugged and followed, catching Liz gently in his encircling arm and holding her close to him as he walked. "Evans," Kyle called, and somehow Max had no doubt that the name was a reference to him and not Isabel. With Kyle, it always meant him. "You... you should probably read this too."

Max swallowed. "You sure, man?"

"Yeah. Guess it won't be easy for you, any more than it was for me, but... but that's just the way things go." Max shrugged, tried to catch up with Kyle, but he was walking faster than Liz seemed to want to go, and Max did not want to let go of Liz to get a message from Tess. The symbolism of that would be way too on the nose. But Kyle started to wait up around the point he was climbing the bridge stairs, and Max reached out for the letter, very deliberately unfolding it with one hand in such a way that Liz could read it if she wanted to. But Liz turned her face away, probably because thought it was significant that Kyle hadn't granted her permission. Max sighed and began to scan the page. For a second his mind refused to focus on the meaning of the words, instead, as a diversionary tactic, scrutinizing the details of the typing itself, which looked like it might have come out of a pretty good laser printer, except that the paper didn't seem to be laser paper. Probably the letters had been burned into the paper by different means entirely, but no computer could have formed the characters with more elegant regularity. Max wondered if the typeface would match a commonly available font on the kind of home computers they all used.

And then, when such observations had come to an end, the words themselves intruded on Max's awareness.

My dear Kyle,

I hope you don't mind that I actually did send you a letter. Everything has changed since we said goodbye, but I've had a lot of time here to think about my misdeeds. Killing Alex is something that will always weigh heavy on my soul... and deceiving Max, trying to use him for my own purposes while proclaiming my love for him. And yet, no matter how great these grand and obvious regrets are, in my heart they are equalled by one that might not seem so obvious - that I pushed you away.

"I confess this to you now: at the prom, when I saw the amount of angsty tension that was stretching between Max and Liz, I saw an opportunity to begin my mission. And, because I couldn't make good progress with Max while I the two of us were together, I 'pushed' you into saying those things about being my sister. Even though I was behind them, it broke my heart to hear you say the words. I also used my powers to 'nudge' Liz into admitting some things she felt that she wouldn't have ordinarily said to Max, things that would finalize the rift between them.

"So... even though we're on different planets about four hundred light years away from each other, and might neither of us be able to cross those empty spaces and meet again, it seems very important to know if the distance between your heart and mine would be even further. Because I love you very much, Kyle, and I know that there might not be any part of you that still loves me. Max's son is growing within me. He will be healthy and happy when he grows up, but he will never be mine - maybe he'll be the foster son of the old Queen. Or maybe Max and Liz will be able to raise him as their own, if Liz can look beyond the circumstances of his conception and love him for the precious little boy that he's going to be.

"I... I don't know if you'll be able to send a reply back to me soon, or at all. It was hard enough to get this 'letter' to earth, and I'm not sure if I'll be able to reach it to you, or if you'll read it once you realize that it actually is from me. But still, I will be waiting to hear your voice, or to read words and know that they came from you. I'm good at waiting, and I've had lots of practice.

"From what I've heard, you'll be having some problems back there. My best wishes are with you, but they are all that I can offer you, aside from this advice, for what little it's worth: I think that all the 'club' needs to find a way to leave Earth - or at least the core group. Some other way than the Granilith, since Kivar wants it so much that risking it in open space is probably self defeating. I'm not sure of what way that might be - but if you see an opportunity, you can't afford to let it pass by without investigation.

Tess."

Max sighed and folded the paper up into fours. Kyle's reply to Tess' question was pretty much none of his business. He was glad that Kyle had let him see the letter, though, for the revelation about Tess' further meddling in his relationship with Liz, (at a point when he hadn't really expected it,) and for the parts about the baby. The idea of he and Liz raising the child together seemed bizarre, but as usual, he had to admit that much stranger things had had...

Preoccupied with his thoughts about the letter, Max stepped out over the first step of the 'down' stairwell at the other side of the passenger bridge, instead of stepping down onto it, and lost his balance quite badly, taking Liz with him, (because his arm was still around her,) and knocking into Kyle, just in front of both of them, and making him stumble. Soon they were tumbling in an ungainly heap down the flight... and came to an awkward stop halfway down. "Yikes!" Liz exclaimed "Everyone okay?"

"Umm, I'm bleeding," Kyle muttered. "Cut myself on a stair, just over the temple, but it doesn't seem too bad."

"My knee hurts like hell," Max admitted. "And my arm is probably one big bruise. But that doesn't seem like much to worry about. You, darling?"

"Umm... think I managed to stay whole - ohh." Just as Max managed to move around enough to get a look at Liz's face, the two of them seemed to recognize that Liz had acquired an ugly scrape on one of her apple cheeks. "Umm... okay, we've got company."

Sure enough, not only had the rest of the gang gathered in concern at the top of the stairs, but a family with a rather large crowd of children had been making their way up the stairs and must have realized by now that something had gone wrong. "Dammit, no time to worry about healing anything before they see us," He managed to pull himself carefully to his feet, aided by Liz, while Kyle extricated himself and pulled himself up using the stairs' hand railing.

Just then, the parents of the family below came into view. "Is... is everything okay up there?" the father asked worriedly. "Is there some instability in the stairs?"

"And do you guys need any help?" the mother added. "First aid, or calling an ambulance..."

"No, the stairs are fine," Max replied, "As long as you use them correctly and carefully, which I guess I managed to mess up, and pull my friends along for a little ride." He sighed. "As far as first aid, we can take care of that back in our vehicle."

"Alright." There was some kafuffle, first allowing the family tribe to pass through, and then for Max himself to try climbing down a few stairs on his injured knee. That hurt very badly and the leg was unsteady enough to be completely worthless, so he concentrated, slipping into a healing trance and altering the molecules and living cells that made up the knee ligament enough that it was partially healed. Then they tromped off towards the motor home.

#

TruAbductee2: Hey, Evans, how goes the road trip?

Max blinked in surprise a bit as the instant message window popped up on the screen of Alex's laptop. Alex had gotten the cellular modem working, and signed onto a Belgian anonymizer proxy service, in order to make it more difficult for anyone to trace their internet signal to this particular part of Ohio. He'd dropped a message to one of Brody's email boxes and a UFO abductees' message board that he frequented, telling him how to contact Alex's laptop via an instant message chat program. It had only been about three minutes before he replied - well, maybe five and a half from when the email had been sent.

SoulMPark: Yeah, thanks for getting back to me so man. The open road is great, but I've got a question. Need to know where we could find the Brazel W institute, and if they do anything in our field.

TrueAbductee2: Brazel? As in - well, I guess that'd be what you're asking me about. Name sounds a bit familiar - let me run it through the database. Is there a period after the w, or just 'Brazel W institute'?"

I looked over at Liz, who had come to sit next to me, and she screwed up her head in thought, and then shook her head. "I... I couldn't tell. Shana's head was right in the way of where the W would be if there was one." Huh - last time she hadn't even been sure if it was on the wall or not - this certainly sounded like it.

SoulMPark: We're not sure. Try both?

TruAbductee2: Already on it. No matches so far.

SoulMPark: Thanks. How... how have things been back in town lately?

TruAbductee2: Exciting enough for me to make like the Chinese and wish to live in a dull era. You've probably heard about the dangerous criminals who came through town?

SoulMPark: Yeah, of course, it's been on the radio everywhere.

(The latest update Max and the others had heard had put the invaders as already in West Tennessee, and gaining. At this rate, it might not be safe to stop in a campsite near Columbus, the way Max had been hoping too.)

TruAbductee2: Well, the good news is that I don't think anyone you're close to was badly hurt. The not-so-good news is that not all of them really left town.

"Uh-oh," Liz muttered.

TruAbductee2: Oh, here's something. Brazel W Institute. Nobody seems to know the origin of the name, whether it's connected to Mac Brazel, or who owns and controls the private corporation. But it's located in Scranton, PA - and has done work in biotech, communications techniques, and other technology that has aroused the interest of many impressionable members of the field.

SoulMPark: The crackpots have it on their radar, then, and the more mainstream UFOlogists don't worry about it much.

TruAbductee2: Yeah, but I'd put my money on the unashamed crackpots most of the time... well, actually, no, not if we're talking serious money on any one thing, because the crackpots often believe stuff that's absolutely nuts. But I wouldn't write them out of this. There's a partial street address - no number, but Mulder Boulevard.

SoulMPark: Thanks. Keep your head down.

TruAbductee2: I always do. Stay on safe ground.

And with that, Brody had apparently logged off... assuming that that really was Brody, but Max decided it would be paranoid to seriously doubt it. The dialog seemed to fit with the man he knew too well, although IM chat conversations were never perfectly like a spoken dialogue.

"Mulder Avenue?" Liz repeated. "Like the guy from the X files?"

"Ohh." Max hadn't even thought of that connection. "Well, we can look for one anyway. Scranton isn't - well, it's halfway across the state from Pittsburgh, and a fairly long way from Louisville, but it's not too far from the route that we'd be taking to continue up into New England from Pittsburgh."

"Hope that we don't bite off more than we can chew if we go there," Kyle said. "Or, if they're into digital tech, maybe that should be byte off, with a y."

"I'm tired of things just getting more complicated," Max said. Even though he knew that he should be trying to get used to it.

Liz gave him a big tight hug. That kind of helped.