The "short cut" involved nothing more than taking the elevator to the topmost level and using one of the other escape hatches to get the to surface, hopefully ahead of Arnaud. Darien had no way of knowing when the plan had gone into effect and the Swiss Mother had made good on his escape. Still, the ground seemed to be undisturbed and the four-wheel-drive Jeep he discovered wore a coating of snow over the winter-camo cover; a fair sign that it still awaited its owner's arrival.

Darien snapped off a pine bough and used it to wipe away any trace of his existence then took up position behind a tree with a mostly unobstructed view of the area. The possibility of Arnaud walking up on Darien unawares was slim. This time he would leave nothing to chance. There'd be no bargains, no compromises, no deals this time. No way. No how. He would get a little back for all the pain and heartache Arnaud had caused him.

And it would feel so damn good.

The only remaining question became should Darien kill the son of a bitch outright or hurt him first. A little torture, a little suffering to give the slimeball a taste of all that Darien had endured physically and emotionally at his hands.

Yeah, that sounded like plan. Some serious pain before ending it for good. Kevin revenged at long last.

Fallon's words, her warning rang through his head one more time: "I've seen, first 'and what vengeance can do to a person, to a good person, and the price is incredibly 'igh. Ye best be sure ye be willing to pay it."

And the answer today was the same as it had been then... Whatever it takes. He liked Fallon, respected her, her skills, but in this, she had no understanding, no comprehension of the manipulations he'd dealt with thanks to Arnaud. He'd lost not only his brother, but his entire life. His choices limited by what he'd been made into, forced to become something he never wanted to be.

Killing Arnaud wouldn't fix any of that, Darien understood that much, but this wasn't about fixing things. This was about some visceral need to right a wrong. Old Testament style. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life. Only after all this time, the life was just as much Darien's as his brother's.

Darien sucked in a deep breath and released it, the coating of Quicksilver he wore keeping it from creating a fog upon the air and potentially giving away his location. A good thing, since a jaunty whistle caught his attention just then and from around the large boulder that hid the access hatch he expected company from came Arnaud, his body outlined in a purple-black aura, instead of streamers of silver.

The little shit had Quicksilver. Darien couldn't believe Arnie-dear would be stupid enough to have another gland implanted given the troubles he'd had with the last one, which meant an external source akin to the backpack built by Mai-Lin. Though if he already had the ability to go invisible it begged the question of his interest in the Chameleon Project.

Not that it mattered, seeing as Darien planned to stop him here and now.

The Quicksilver shattered and fell away from Arnaud, who continued unconcerned towards his vehicle, the mask he'd worn to portray Covington gone, revealing his true countenance; a smile of total satisfaction on his face. Clearly, he was confident his plan had gone off without a hitch.

Well now, if Darien didn't have a surprise for the smug bastard.

Darien stepped out from behind his tree. "Arnie, you never call, never write."

Arnaud froze mid-step. "Fawkes?"

Darien let the Quicksilver flake away. "C'mon now, who else would it be?" he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

Arnaud didn't bat so much as an eye. "And what brings you here?" he asked, arms spreading wide to encompass the entire snow-covered mountain.

Darien shrugged and began to pace slowly towards the man. "Well, once Huiclov went AWOL, it wasn't too hard to track you down." He paused a few feet away from his nemesis, just out of easy reach. "You left quite the paper trail."

Arnaud shook his head. "I meant here. I'm in the middle of... a project. I'll need at least a week..." He trailed off at the lack of reaction he received. "You're here about Chameleon, aren't you?"

"Duh," Darien replied. "Why else would I be standing on the top of a mountain in the dead of winter?"

Arnaud laughed. "Oh, I can think of a few reasons."

Darien knew his confusion showed on his face, but he couldn't help that. "We're here to stop you..."

Arnaud laughed all the harder for a few seconds then the mirth cut off abruptly. "You and your little Agency are much too late on that score. Chameleon is mine and there is nothing you can do about it."

Darien smiled, teeth bared in a dangerous snarl. "Wanna bet?" He lunged forward, taking Arnaud by surprise and knocking him to the ground.

They struggled, kicking up great gouts of snow until they came to a rest with Darien on top. Both panted harshly, their breath pluming out in the cold air.

Darien got in a solid punch to Arnie's jaw, dazing him. "I am so gonna enjoy this," he growled, a perverse glee settling over him like a shroud as he shifted his weight in preparation for another punch.

Arnaud coughed, his teeth bloody, and snapped, "Fool, I have what you want."

That gave Darien pause, and one hand tightened about the collar of Arnaud's jacket and lifted him up slightly. "All I want from you is screams of pain."

Arnaud raised an eyebrow. "Are you certain of that?"

Baffled, Darien could only ask, "What are you talking about?"

"Nothing perhaps." Arnaud tried to shift, setting his forearms on the snow-covered ground for leverage, but Darien would have none of it and slammed the man back down.

"Nothing, is right," Darien sneered and swung another punch at Arnaud's face, solidly striking his right cheek bone with a soul-satisfying crack. Oh, this was going to be much more fun that he imagined.

This time when Darien raised his fist for another strike, Arnaud struggled, perhaps realizing for the first time he was in serious danger, his hands coming up to wrap about Darien's wrist to prevent the blow from landing.

It turned into an outright brawl, complete with squirming, punching, kicking and biting -- though none vicious enough to break the skin through the layers of clothes. Darien outweighed Arnaud and had far more determination to win, and would have had it not been for the fair-sized piece of nature Arnaud managed to find buried in the snow.

All Darien knew was the sudden appearance of stars and a decided disinterest in continuing the wrestling match.

His eyes swung into bleary focus to find Arnaud standing over him, foot planted firmly on Darien's chest and hand wrapped about his right wrist.

"Wha...?" he struggled to say, head still ringing like a church bell after noon.

Arnaud smiled grimly, eye already swelling shut. "Don't check your pet too often these days, now do you?" He twisted Darien's arm about, shoved the sleeve down to mid-forearm to reveal the serpent coiled quiescently there.

Darien stared at it. "Huh? Why would I..."

Arnaud tapped his wrist, just above the tail.

The red tail.

Darien blinked.

It couldn't be.

The tail couldn't... shouldn't be red.

Darien jerked his hand from Arnaud to examine the tattoo up close, even going so far as to rub it with his thumb in a vain effort to remove the color.

But it remained unchanged.

The tail was still red.

"How?" Darien asked, head lifting to look at Arnaud who looked particularly smug.

"Genius, pure genius, Fawkes. Though I must admit it took a bit longer than I expected." Arnaud glanced up at the sky, as if attempting to gauge the time by the position of the sun, then at his watch. "Well, this has been fun, but I have somewhere to be." He moved away towards the Jeep. "Have your girlfriend call me when you're ready to talk." He chuckled softly, then turned his back on Darien without a care in the world.

Darien, realizing he was about to lose his prey, shouted, "No," and surged to his feet... only to have his vision tunnel within three steps, gray fuzz stealing his sight and white noise overpowering the sound of an engine rumbling to life.

He stopped, head throbbing, but too late, as the world shifted suddenly and went dark, leaving him sprawled bonelessly in the snow.

That's where Alex and Bobby found him ten minutes later.


They got Fawkes to the medic down on level one and left him there while a contingent of Marines with Bobby tagging along tried to catch up with Arnaud. A useless task; he was long gone; the trail left by his Jeep meeting up with dry asphalt and leaving them with no idea where he'd gone. After a couple hours of fruitless searching, they found the vehicle abandoned at a truck stop. Questioning of employees got them nothing and the security feed told them even less. Yes, it showed him parking, but less than five minutes later he'd been picked up by a nondescript dark colored SUV. The plates so blurred that even the state couldn't be made out.

Arnaud had gotten away.

Alex had gone with the Marines looking for the Chameleon test team. GPS placed them in a lightly forested area at the bottom of a valley, but they found nothing and had been forced to widen the search area, even putting men on the ground to look for signs of the team's passage on foot. Hours and hours passed with no success and less and less hope the team of four would be found alive.

And that was before the computer system failed. Ate itself would be a better description. Apparently, the virus uploaded by Arnaud had a self-destruct that kicked in two hours after the escape had been made. The computer geeks did everything they could, but had been unable to save anything, the entire system burned out and useless.

A blessing in disguise it turned out, in some small way. With the main system completely offline, they switched to the back-up which had never had the newest changes uploaded onto it. Even better, it had been running through the entire test and provided a different set of final coordinates for the location of the team. A location miles away from where they were supposed to be. It would have taken the search team days to reach the spot by foot and with the thick cover; they would never have been spotted by air.

All four were dead, their bodies stripped of the suits and left where they had fallen, like dolls discarded by a tempestuous child bored with his toys. With utmost care, Alex and the Marines covered their bodies and brought them home. Efforts at tracking the GPS still imbedded in the suits yielded nothing. They had apparently been deactivated.

Arnaud had gotten away with the suits, and probably all the key information on them. God only knew what the madman would do with them. This time however, the project wasn't dead. All the data was backed up and everything could be rebuilt. The Chameleon Project would continue. Shit, it would have to if only to stop everyone who ended up with the tech.

Twelve hours passed before they rejoined Fawkes, who, thanks to the blow to the head had the headache from hell, but no concussion. Hobbes assumed that the moping had to do with not grabbing Arnaud more than anything else. That was until Hobbes saw the very real fear in the young man's eyes.

It was then Fawkes gave them the really bad news and showed them the tattoo.


Darien sat sideways on the exam chair, hands dangling loosely between his thighs, shoulders drooping, and head tipped down, waiting.

He'd done little else but wait the last few days while Claire ran one test after another to ascertain exactly what had occurred. Those anomalous results hadn't been. No, they'd been a warning. One that she had very nearly dismissed as impossible. But where Darien Fawkes was concerned, nothing, it seemed, was impossible. She had answers now; answers that were mind bogglingly confusing. She only wished they were more positive.

She thumbed through the file, all the dry facts, suppositions, the best guesses, and ultimately the reality that her Kept would face, and then set it aside. On this occasion, she needed to be Claire and not The Keeper. Compassion and not enigmatic authoritarianism would stand a far better chance of forestalling the deep depression she knew would follow her words.

She went to him, setting a hand on his knee and waited for him to lift his head and meet her gaze.

"Keep, you can drop the sympathy act. Just tell me what's going on." He didn't even bother glancing at her, clearly anticipating the worst yet to come.

She didn't take his accusation to heart, knowing he had awaited that sword hanging he saw her as holding over his head to fall for quite some time now.

Where to start... "I have the results of the blood tests and the biopsy of the gland tissue," she paused, feeling the muscles of his leg tense beneath her palm. "The madness toxin is definitely in your system, in high enough quantity to register on the monitor, but the gland is not the source."

Darien's head snapped up, confusion crawling across his features. "Not from the gland? But where else could it be coming from?"

A good question and one for which she wished she had an answer. "I'm not sure."

A sneer made its first appearance. "You're not sure. That's just great."

"Darien... I do have a theory, if you would like to hear it." She took a step back, not interested in being the target of his anger no matter how justified he thought it might be.

"What the hell. Not like I have any plans." The sullen attitude wasn't likely to improve so she forged ahead.

"The gland is completely free of the gene sequence that created the madness. The suicide therapy did work, however, I think it was also booby-trapped."

"Didn't you check before you gave it to me?"

"Of course I did, but this… if it is what happened, then it was either a random accident -- an unexpected side-effect, if you will -- or cunningly hidden. I will need to do more research to ascertain which." Claire gave him a moment to digest that bit of information.

"Oh, it wasn't an accident," he finally said. "Arnie said he'd been expecting me and was surprised it had taken so long." He flung himself around against the seat back. "Shit. He planned this from the start."

Claire sighed. She would have to take apart that 'cure' piece by piece to figure out precisely how this had been done.

"So what happened?" Darien prompted.

"I believe the cure also functioned similar to a virus. Killing the genes in the gland, but also releasing them into your system. One appears to have found a new home," she explained in the simplest terms she could manage.

"Like a seed or something?"

"An apt analogy, actually. The seedling produced is generating the toxin."

"Where?"

Claire shook her head. "That I do not know. It could be anywhere, lymph node, sweat glands, functioning with an existing metabolic system much as it did with the Quicksilver gland, or it could be in muscle tissue, mimicking the behavior of a tumor." Claire didn't want to frighten him, but he needed to know the truth in order to be able to make rational decisions in the coming weeks and months.

"Can't you just give me the cure again?"

Damn, he wasted no time, did he?

"Yes, I could, however we risk the same trap occurring again. A year from now we'd be right back here with nothing really resolved."

He nodded, giving the distinct impression that he'd expected that particular answer. "Can you fix it? The cure, I mean."

"Yes, but it will take time." The bare truth.

He sat there silent for several long minutes, thinking or perhaps the opposite, avoiding the situation for a few precious moments more. Finally, he said, "Okay. What do we do now?"

Claire couldn't believe he'd taken it so well. She had expected bitching and moaning and a classic Darien 'woe is me' tirade. Clearly, he had become far more depressed than she'd realized.

"I want to take 'yet another blood sample'," she encapsulated the words in air quotes, knowing the irony he'd ascribe them, "from which I will extract the toxin." She retrieved the rubber tourniquet from the nearby mayo cart and wrapped it snugly about his biceps. Moments later she had two large vials of blood marked and stored away. Only then did she continue her explanation, "I'm going to duplicate the toxin, and after making a batch of counteragent, run a series of tests on rats."

"Why?" Darien asked, checking under the cotton ball to see if he'd stopped bleeding yet.

"I want to make certain the counteragent still works to flush the toxin," she told him, though all preliminary tests had assured her it would.

"Why does it matter? I'm immune to the counteragent, remember?" There was so little hope in his voice that Claire wanted to cry.

"You were becoming immune a year ago. Your resistance should be zero by now."

His head came up, emotions warring with one another on his face for long seconds until settling on the one she least expected.

Amazing how just the tiniest bit of good news lifted the spirits. She could only hope yet more would be of greater benefit to his shaky state of mind.

"Once I've confirmed the counteragent works -- which I fully expect -- I will give you a dose."

He sighed heavily. "Weekly shots, here I come," he grumbled. Even at that she could hear the profound relief in his words.

Claire wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him. Yes, things were bad, but not nearly as awful as he seemed to believe. She took his right hand into both of hers, rotating it so that the snake lying coiled on his inner wrist was clearly visible.

"How many segments are red?" she asked. Once upon a time, three days would have meant as many as six segments turned crimson with no use of the gland.

"One," he muttered.

"Exactly. One segment is red and you discovered it three days ago." She could feel the way his entire body suddenly stilled, like his entire being had paused, waiting for something of great importance to happen.

"I... Crap. I didn't even realize..." His fingers curled about her hand and a pleading tone stole into his voice. "How long?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Which is why, once I've given you the counteragent, we are going to keep careful track of when each segment turns red."

"So it might be one a month or something?" Hope, tiny and barely flickering, but there, appeared in his eyes.

"Perhaps, though I suspect the rate will increase over time." He looked confused. "As the seedling grows it will produce more and more toxin. Which is why we need to keep track."

"Okay. I can do that. What else might be different?" he asked and she could only be thankful he had decided, however reluctantly, to rejoin humanity and deal with the problem directly. Hiding would get him... them nowhere.

"The madness itself."

"Huh?"

She smiled. "Remember, the Quicksilver bacteria?"

He nodded.

"It's possible you may react more like I or the Official did. No headaches, no seizures..."

"But I thought you guys reacted different 'cause you didn't have glands. I still do y'know."

"I am aware," she replied sardonically. "The toxin used to be produced by the gland, causing it to react to an overdose violently. Now... well, now it may not. Or only in later stages. I need to run some tests."

"What about Stage Five?" he asked in a hushed, fearful tone.

"Again I need to run some tests, but I doubt it can recur. The toxin was tied to the Quicksilver, affecting its absorption..." she trailed off as his face went blank. Now wasn't the time for long-winded techno-babble, even the easy to understand layman version. He simply wanted to know everything would be all right.

"There is some good news," Claire said softly.

Darien's eyebrows rose, asking the question he did not wish to voice aloud.

"Because the toxin is being produced outside the gland it will have no effect on how long you Quicksilver," she explained, and waited for the light to dawn in his eyes.

It did, but slowly; deep clouds and drowning rain obscuring the illuminating white light.

"Ain't that just perfect," he finally groused, clearly unhappy with this revelation.

"Darien, I thought you would be pleased."

"You mean the 'Fish'll be pleased, don't you?" he countered, anger coloring the words.

"Why do you say that?" she asked, at a total loss.

"And you're the smart one." He shook his head ruefully. "Unlimited invisibility and a very tight leash. How more perfect could it be?"

Claire contained the gasp of realization by the barest of margins. She hadn't considered that, had been so focused on finding out what had happened that she'd forgotten about after. Darien had hit it dead on. The Official was going to be as satisfied as a cat full of cream-topped canary.

He sighed heavily and slipped from the exam chair. "Guess this explains those dreams, huh?"

"I suppose it does," she agreed, no longer able to deny the premonitions he sometimes seemed to have about future events. "Darien, I will fix this." She knew she would. She wouldn't fail him again.

"Promise me that."

That, however she would not do, and the desperation in his voice nearly broke her heart. "I can't."

His shoulders slumped, head hanging so low that all she could see was hair and a hint of cheekbone. "Lie to me, then."

She shook her head. She refused to give him false hope. The road before them would not be easy, but he could endure it. She was utterly certain of that. "We'll get through this, Darien."

His head came up and he snorted in derision. "When you have the threat of Quicksilver Madness hanging over your pretty little head, then and only then will we get through this." He walked away, around the glass screen and into the other half of the lab. "We done?"

No, they weren't, but he obviously had all he needed for now and wanted only to get away. "For now."

He nodded slightly and made the effort to smile, to assure her that he held no ill will towards her. He shouldn't have bothered. The slight upturning of his lips failed to be anything but a parody of the real act. His eyes were haunted, certain that there would be no saving of the day this time. His life sentence had returned upon him once again. She wished she could say something... anything to convince him otherwise.

The door slid open before he triggered it, admitting Bobby. "Hey, partner."

Darien managed a mumbled "Hey," in return, but didn't even pause his exit, the door shutting behind him a moment later.

"That bad?" Bobby asked.

"Bad enough," she confirmed. "I know we have plans, but would you mind keeping an eye on him? He's got me worried."

Bobby kissed her on the cheek. "Not a problem, Keep. I'll make sure he doesn't do anything too stupid."

"Thank you, Bobby." She moved to the table and picked up the file. "Now I get to tell the Official." She frowned. "I hope he doesn't gloat too much."

" 'Course he will. Being a bastard is part of his job description," Bobby assured her with false cheer. "Fawkes'll be all right. He has us, remember?"

"That he does, Bobby." She hugged the files to her chest. "I'll call you later."

"And that is my cue to exit." Her gave her a quick kiss and backed towards the door, holding it open so she could leave as well.

He strode away from her through the double-doors at the end of the hall while she headed for the stairwell, dreading this meeting with the Official.