It hadn't eaten her yet. Sam could feel the heat of the its breath on her cheek, smell the awful stench. Her heart pounded in her ears, but she could hear its panting, too, and irritation surged inside her that the beast had to terrify her rather than just getting it over with. The time lagged, and lagged some more, until she couldn't take it anymore and opened her eyes to see what was happening.

The creature's face was only a foot from hers, and through the red, matted fur, two surprisingly blue eyes stared back. It rose a bit, until the paw cradled to its chest was level with her little ledge. And as it let the paw fall away, a cascade of tiny berries piled on the rock beside her head.

And the beast skittered to the other side of the cave.

Sam's gaze flickered uneasily between the animal and the mound of berries it had left. She'd expected to be dinner, not be brought dinner, and the sudden upending of the equation had her off guard. This was a vicious beast. She was absolutely certain it had killed Caten and his two henchmen, and now it hunched in a corner, looking cowed and unsure.

Unsure. She almost laughed aloud at that – at her ridiculous compulsion to assign emotions and motives to plants and animals as though they were people.

Then it struck her. And her heart skipped a beat. "You're one of them, aren't you?" she asked quietly. "One of their experiments. You're human."

It made a grunting noise, and she wondered if it – he or she – knew how to speak. If it was physically capable of speech, with a mouth formed that way.

If it even had the capacity to understand speech.

She needed to communicate, and she needed to eat, and two things seemed fairly well aligned at the moment. Biting back the cringe of pain, Sam reached across with her good hand (but bad shoulder) and picked up one of the berries, popped it in her mouth and said, "Thank you."

It grunted again. And she could swear the movement it made was a nod.

~/~

"We can track her on the surveillance footage until they shove her in the back of a vehicle and leave the city," Reynolds reported over the radio as Jack scanned the trees with his flashlight, looking for any sign of his 2IC. "So that's not nearly as interesting as what happens in Lab Four. They spend the next couple of minutes running around to all the computers. Deleting things, if I had my guess."

SG-1's leader keyed his radio by muscle memory, never abandoning his search. "Have you figured out what she found?"

"Specifically? No. The footage isn't clear enough to read the screens. But Jack, it could have been anything. The science they're doing here is seriously sketchy."

"Such as?"

"Cloning," he said. Then, "People. Babies. They made four clones and raised them in different environments to see how they'd do. One was all but abandoned; one was abused. They do stuff to prisoners, too – break a law here, and you're basically signing yourself up for invasive medical experiments until you die or get out. But mostly die. It's like there's no moral oversight at all, y'know? We had all that uproar about cloning a damn sheep, but here…. It's like as long as it's progress, they don't care."

"Do they know?" That was Daniel's voice. "The public. Do they have any idea what their government is doing?"

"Some of it. They know about the prisoners," Reynolds told him, "but they accept it as a consequence of breaking the law, I guess. Here's the thing: morally questionable as it all is, this stuff was easy to pull up. It might be classified, but it's not hidden. It sure looked like whatever Carter found, they were trying to hide."

Jack set his teeth. "Makes you wonder how bad it is."

"Exactly."

"Sir."

Jack headed for the beam of Penhall's flashlight and the man standing in the dark behind it. "Yeah."

"One of the soldiers said he thought he tagged her right before she veered off and disappeared, right?" the sergeant asked. "I'll bet it was here."

He shifted the light a few inches. The mark on the rock was small, but it was definitely a hand print. In blood, and it made Jack's jaw go tight. His teammate had been most likely shot and definitely bloody a full day before. She was a helluva fighter, but that didn't look good. "Mark this as her last known location."

"Yes, sir."

"Jack!"

That was Dixon, from higher on the mountain, and the colonel trotted up the steep creek bed to meet him. "What've you got?"

The patch of dirt at his feet was bare of the leave that covered everything else. The clear swatch continued over the lip of the ridge and several feet down the sharp decline.

"What are you looking at?" Daniel asked, joining them at the edge of the ridge.

"Something slid through here," the other colonel told him.

With any luck, it had been Carter. On her rear. Carefully. But Jack wasn't feeling particularly lucky, and the drop was long. Frowning, he stepped onto the slope and skidded his way down.

~/~

She'd built cover, and that was a good sign. She'd obviously had to drag herself to it, which implied injury, which wasn't so good. But the act of choosing a decent hiding spot and improving on it implied not just consciousness, but coherence, and that was the best news Jack had heard all day.

The issue, of course, was that Carter wasn't in the nest she'd built. Nor had she crawled out of it in the same manner she'd used to crawl in, which implied she hadn't left under her own steam. Lips pursed, he turned on the ambassador in frustration. "If I find out that your people have her-"

"If they do, I know nothing," the alien defended.

"That would be easier to believe if you hadn't lied to us from the very beginning," Daniel told him.

"Anything?" Jack asked as Dixon finished his survey and headed back to the group.

"No human prints, and no other signs of Major Carter's blood," he said grimly.

Too grimly. "But?" the archaeologist prompted.

"Rina was right," he continued. "There are tracks. Big tracks. Probably a predator."

Jack's chest turned icy. That was it, then; he was going to find her dead and disfigured somewhere in the frigid valley.

"Nothing here, sir," Brooks called from further out.

"Let's assume she found some random Good Samaritan," the colonel said, because he couldn't bear to think anything else. "Let's assume she's conscious. Where would they want to go?"

"Away from the soldiers," Daniel said.

"To the city to find you guys," Dixon put in. "But that's miles away, and she's hurt."

"To a vehicle, then," Penhall decided.

Jack nodded and turned to Rina. "Caten brought her out here in a car, and if he's dead, he's not using it. Where is it?"

"It has been taken back to town," she said coldly.

"Where was it?" She didn't answer, and his hand found the grip of his sidearm again. "I swear I'll do to you what you tried to do to her."

She eyed the mountainside with disdain, because they were going to haul her back up it as roughly as they'd hauled her down, and she was hardly wearing the right shoes for that. "Further up the road."