Disclaimers in Part 1

Sideswipe put his foot right in it.

Hauled out the other one, and did the same.

Sixty-five feet above the stream bed (and Jazz-and-Chip, as his bet was with Jazz, and Chip seemed to be quite happily serving as Jazz' wheels these days), he reached for the next handhold on a bank the little stream had diligently worked to carve for forty-seven million years.

The first sixty-five feet of it, gently striated in shades of cream, rust, peach, and orange, now bore fair-sized holes, shaped to fit Sides' peds and servos. In time, the small creatures of the canyon and the air would find them compatible as nest holes. Sides, however, was about to use them as a shortcut to disaster.

Chip was frankly gawking, entranced by the sight of a twenty-five foot robot free-climbing. Jazz was a thin mist beside him, doing the same.

Sides' new handhold crumbled in his grip just as he put all his faith in it, and removed one ped to chunk it back in farther up. He hastily drove his ped back into the wall, at a new site, and crunched his toes on the only slab of non-sedimentary rock in the entire wall. He made an emergency grab at the faulty handhold, only to have it crumble further.

At this point, unfairly, Sides insisted, gravity intervened.

Jazz jumped into the wheelchair, and went from zero to twenty in reverse in 0.34 seconds. "Hey!" Chip shouted, thrown hard against his restraints. "What the heck!"

No explanation was necessary. Sideswipe hit the dry earth below the cliff with a resounding "Thooom!" followed by several seconds of absolute dead silence. Then a few distant birds began to ask one another, "What was that?"

Sides didn't stir. Chip raced back to him, expecting to find…who knew what. Who knew what he was going to be able to do about it, either.

Jazz "jumped" to Sides' tall frame when Chip came to a stop beside the bot. He inserted himself into the former frontliner's systems, activated his comms, and called Ratchet.

::Ratchet? This's Jazz. I'm on Sideswipe's frequency because he's taken a pretty good fall out here, and scrambled his circuits.::

::Oh, for Primus' sake. You alone with him?::

::Nah. I came out here with Chip.::

::Okay. You got the field-medic skill, and Chip's got the hands. Do what you can. I'll be there ASAP.:: The connection snapped.

Jazz ran a full diagnostic, then got out—ordinarily he wouldn't have drawn enough energy from Sideswipe to be a hazard, but his friend was injured. "Ah don't know how he fragged himself up so bad, Ah've seen him take longer falls than that pullin' that jet-judo stunt o' his on Screamer's trine."

Chip had gone into crisis mode. He said, "Prioritize the repairs and tell me what needs doin'." He reached behind him to pull his tool kit and gloves from the back of the chair.

"OK, worst is, that reset threw his fuel pump off rhythm an' it's starvin' his spark for power. You gotta get that fixed right now."

Chip slung the tool kit over his back by looping a bungee cord through its handle and over one shoulder. Then he pulled the chair right beside Sideswipe, raised the seat as high as it would go, and climbed hand-over-hand to Sideswipe's chest. "Jazz, you're gonna have to unlatch his chest plates so I can pull 'em open."

Jazz did so. There were energon leaks; Chip told Jazz, "Lemme know if I'm 'bout to drag my legs through more'n a few drops of hot energon—I won't know I'm getting' scalded, an' Ratchet'll strangle us both."

"Ya got that right. Ya oughta be fine, long as ya stay right there."

Chip went to work; he was so engrossed in it he didn't feel his hat falling down Sides' chestplates to the desert floor below. "Dang, I need to reset this, but if it don't start right back up—how long would my chair battery supply his spark an' processor, if it came t' that?"

"Long enough for Ratchet to get here."

"OK, here goes." He disconnected and reconnected the power to Side's fuel pump. It sputtered—then, to their relief, started up again at the proper rate.

There was no time to indulge in that relief. Leaks had to be stopped, or else the leaking lines clamped off until Ratchet could deal with them. Then, the front-liner's cooling system had to be brought back on line before the desert heat caused processor damage.

By the time Ratchet got there, Chip was exhausted, but Sideswipe was stable.

Sunstreaker carried his brother down to the mouth of the canyon, where Ironhide waited with a flatbed trailer. Ratchet transformed and lowered a chair lift to bring Chip and Jazz back to base.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

Sunstreaker glowered down at Chip Chase from a seat beside his twin, who lay inert on a med bay berth. "The Pit are you doing in here?"

Chip stood his ground, though he reached only halfway up Sunstreaker's shin. "I came to see how Sides was. Bot scared the life outta me yesterday."

Chip and Sides both showed the effects of the previous day still: Sides was crumpled here and there, and remained in stasis; Chip was a lot pinker than Parker had approved of around the tops of his ears, the backs of his hands, his forearms, his cheekbones, and the end of his nose. His hat had taken a tumble to the desert sand while he was working on Sides, and he hadn't noticed until Ratchet handed it to him.

Still: he was pink, not red. He'd said as much to Parker, who replied, "It's not the sunburn I'm worried about, it's the incipient melanoma. Here, I've got slides."

She had slides, all right. Chip, released from med bay, proceeded immediately to the small store Mr. Najantdahl, after passing every security check the government possessed going in and a few they'd thought up on the spot, had been allowed to open across the main road from the base's front gate, and bought sunscreen, and a bigger hat with a chin strap. He also considered the purchase of long-sleeved white T-shirts which Parker had suggested (or, if you squinted, insisted upon), but c'mon, man, only sissies wore those.

Final score: Parker 2, Chase 1.

Given the same situation, he'd have done exactly what he did all over again: hell with everything else, get the bot stable.

Sunstreaker sighed, and the servo clenching Sideswipe's worked once, gently. "Ratchet says he's going to be all right. He's a little worried that he hasn't come online yet, but he says he will."

"Good."

"Ratchet also says you saved his life, so you might as well tell me what happened."

"Thank you" was noticeable by its absence from that sentence, but Chip figured that was as much as he was going to get. "Sides was freeclimbin' a rock wall. From what I saw, one of his handholds started to give, an' then he tried to kick a toehold into a place that was too hard to do that. The handhold crumbled the rest of the way, and down he came."

The beautiful yellow face frowned. "Why the slag would he go freeclimbing?"

"He's your brother. You'd be the one to know."

"He had a bet with somebot, didn't he?"

"That he did."

"Who?"

"If I tell you, you gonna pound the lubricant out of them?"

Sunstreaker grimaced. "Ironhide'll return the favor if I do."

"Besides, it ain't that bot's fault."

"Yeah, yeah, I know." Sunstreaker stroked Sides' helm once, gently. "You have any idea what it's like to have the other half of your spark held by an idiot?"

"He ain't an idiot. He's pretty well-liked, actually; guy's got a good heart. Pump. Whatever."

Sides chose that moment to cycle back online. "Gro?" he slurred.

Sunstreaker sighed, and commed Ratchet. "Right here, Sides."

Chip said, "See you later. Glad you're back, Sides," and got out of the way.

Two hours later, thoroughly chastised (though Ratchet had skipped the wrench beatdown this time; several connections interior to Sides' helm weren't in good enough shape to absorb any more impacts, the medic said, which didn't mean he wasn't sorely tempted so don't push it, kid) and completely bored, Sides was reading a datapad.

He was still crumpled. Ratchet had run several tests, unhooked Side's IV, gave him a cube of energon, and excused himself: Skysong was being readied for another surgery.

Noise outside Side's part of med bay resolved itself into two-thirds of the Tiny Trine whirling through the air above his berth.

"Hey, you two. What's goin' on?" the frontliner said, and put down his datapad.

The mechlings, at his gesture of invitation, parked on his chestplate. "You're all crumply," Storm complained.

"Yeah, I am. Fell pretty hard. How are you two?"

Sides was, to borrow a human term, winging it. He had little experience with the Tiny Trine, although he'd held a sleeping sparkling a time or two (and ignored that part of his coding which took up the chant "Want want want!").

The mechlings looked at one another. Then the dark blue one (Storm ...wing, yeah, that was it) said, "Okay. Waiting for Skysong."

"Oh. She's with Ratchet?"

The small faces crumpled, and Sides' fuel pump melted. Or that's what it felt like, anyway. "Come here," he said, and gathered them in.

He let them cry, their tiny arms around his neck, until the yellow one, Starskimmer, snuffled and said, "Ratchet says she be okay, but she been in there long."

"Long time? That's kinda worrying, huh. Even with Ratchet as good as he is, it's still scary."

Stormwing sniffled, and wiped his olfactor on Sides' neck strut. "Yeah. An' this time it's a surg'ry, not jus' a samination."

Sides wondered briefly what Witwicky had to do with it before he sorted that sentence out. "Well, she has to get better from that accident she had, and sometimes the only way to do that is to get Ratchet to help. He helps me a lot, and I'm always better afterward."

Two pairs of optics, both brimming with cleaning fluid, inspected him from his collar struts. "You are?" one of the optics' owners said.

"Always. I'm always better."

"Oh," said one mechling. Both of them settled into him, and then got heavier: they were recharging.

Sides just cuddled them for a while, enjoying their presence. Then he realized that Barricade was likely frantic with worry, pinged him without result, and then pinged Ratchet, who must still have been in surgery, because his line was locked down. Same with Jolt. Now what?

After some more baby-cuddling, he pinged Jazz.

::Sides, my mech! Glad to see you're up. How you feelin'?::

::Fine, fine. Actually I've got the mechlings with me while Sky's in surgery. Would you mind pinging Barricade for me? He didn't respond to me when I pinged him.::

There was a moment's silence, and then Jazz said, ::Bit of a problem there. He's not responding to me either. Just a minute while I sic a human onto that.::

It was eventually Diarwen, not a human, who found Barricade slumped, recharging, in one of Ratchet's waiting-room chairs. "Hi! Barricade!" she shouted, without result.

Sighing, she resigned herself, and began to climb his shin. When she got to his knee, she shouted again: again without result. Pounding his armor produced nothing.

Diarwen scowled, and turned out her pockets. A tissue, slightly used; a power-bar wrapper; the key to her apartment; an interesting rock she'd found in the desert.

The key she dismissed as possible inter-species ballistic missile simply because she had no wish to lose it. She threw the first two at Barricade. No response. She fetched them back and attempted the same, this time with shout attached: he slept on.

The small stone she weighed in her hand: she didn't want to do Barricade any damage. She decided it would do, if she lofted it instead of throwing it hard.

It hit the mech precisely between the optics, and he snorted awake. But his optics were unfocused, and drifting shut again.

He must be exhausted, she realized, and shouted his name again, following it with the apartment key. (Needs must; it fell to the floor.) She realized that she had never before seen metallic bags under the eyes. Those bags didn't look any better on a Cybertronian than they did on an Earther.

"Hi, Barricade!" she shouted. "Wake up! Down here, mech!"

He scowled down at her. "Whaddaya want, squishy?"

She thought she'd never seen anything as terrifying as a twenty-foot pissed-off Cybertronian, short on sleep. But being terrified and reacting to that feeling were two different things, and Diarwen had never given in to the second. "I want to tell you where the hatchlings are," she said. "You may have noticed, they are not with you."

The scowl deepened. "Fine. Where are they?"

"They are in the med bay ward, on Sideswipe's berth with him."

He growled and got up, and she scowled herself at his retreating backplates. "You are welcome!" she shouted, hands on hips, and began to wonder how she was going to get down from the chair.

She settled on a dive into a forward roll, found her key, and went about the rest of her day. Rutting ungrateful impolite ex-Decepticons, anyway, the childless Diarwen thought (translated roughly from the Sidhe).

The rutting ungrateful impolite ex-Decepticon stamped his way to the other side of med bay. When he burst through the door, Sideswipe held one finger to his lip-plates, that useful human gesture for "Don't make so fraggin' much noise!"

"I'll take them," he whispered gruffly. "Sorry they bothered you."

"They weren't a bother. Why don't you lie down on another berth and get some sleep? I ain't goin' nowhere, neither are they, and you look terrible, mech."

"Yeah, thanks." Barricade rubbed a servo down his faceplates. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure."

Barricade looked him in the optics. "Thanks, mech."

"Welcome. Get some sleep."

Barricade did that little thing, and woke to the sounds of Sideswipe "reading" a story to the kids, from a data pad which held no such thing, and making oral-cavity sound effects to compensate. He yawned and stretched, and found himself immediately the host of a blue-and-yellow necktie.

"Cade! CadeCadeCade! You was rechargin' an' Sides's readin' to us! You come listen, too!"

And this is how, when Ratchet finished Skysong's surgery and carried her, still asleep, into the ward, Sideswipe, suddenly abandoned by his collarful of hatchlings, put down a datapad and smiled at Barricade, saying, "See you later."

Barricade stood up, and resisted the urge to ask the silver swordsmech how much it was worth to him to ensure that Barricade kept to himself the news that Sideswipe could make up a rather interesting story for hatchlings on the fly, and then pretend to read it to them, with sound effects. "Thanks again. Say…" Barricade found his toes very interesting, suddenly. "Wanna spar some time?"

"Yeah, I would. Let me escape Ratchet, and I'll ping you."

"Deal. Thanks again, Sideswipe."

Sides nodded, and picked up his datapad once more. It proved to be much less interesting without an audience, or the sound effects.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

Ratchet checked Skysong's monitors. She was doing fine, and once the attachment points of her internal wing braces had self-repaired to the point that she could begin to move them, he brought her out of medical stasis into normal recharge.

That accomplished, he pinged Barricade with the information that she would wake up shortly.

She had started to stir a little when the big black-and-white arrived. Skimmer and Stormy joined her on the berth, chirping excitedly when they realized her wing braces were gone.

Ratchet private-channeled them, ::She can't fly yet, so don't pester her about it!::

Two tiny signals chorused, ::Yes, Ratchet.::

He shook his head as they snuggled up to their sister. It didn't take long for her to finish waking up, not with a brother chirping in each audial.

She was overjoyed that the awkward, uncomfortable brace was gone, and she could stretch and otherwise move her wings a little. Seekers, and seeker-kin like door-wingers, depended on the sensors in their wings, as well as using them to express emotion.

Ratchet checked her range of motion. As was to be expected after having been in the external fixator for so long, she was very stiff and sore and very vocal about that. But unlike certain silver twins, she didn't whine unless she had something to whine about. He explained what was going on by transmitting pictures to her and Barricade of the internal fixators, then told her, "These let you fold your wings or spread them out. But you can't flap them. They would come out of joint or break again, so the braces won't let you do that. You can make them stronger by trying to flap them, but they won't actually move that way."

She tried it, and found that a loud whirring noise resulted, which delighted all three sparklings, but not Barricade, who gave Ratchet a very dirty look. He was going to be hearing that noise a lot for a while.

Ratchet smirked, not having forgotten all the extra work Barricade had made for him over the vorns. He gave Song a rust stick, then of course had to give one to the each of the mechlings as well.

"Keep her in your apartment today," he said to Barricade, "and make sure to oil all her wing joints carefully tonight when you bathe her. That will help with the stiffness, but she's going to have to work most of that out on her own. Starting tomorrow, she can run and play as much as she wants. Movement will help more than anything. Get Flareup to put her supplements in a batch of energon goodies. I want to be sure she gets them all, and she's going to need the extra energy as well."

"Right," Barricade said. He picked up Song and let her magnalock to his chest plates, then told the mechlings to come along.

Ratchet checked on Sideswipe, who was swinging the leg he hadn't bent into a pretzel off the side of the berth. "How do you feel?"

"OK, I guess. What did I do anyway?"

"You hit your fraggin' helm on a rock and fritzed yourself. It's a wonder you didn't end up with a permanent glitch. If Chip hadn't been there, with Jazz to tell him what to do, we would have lost you," Ratchet told him bluntly. "Unmaker take it, Sides, you'd have killed yourself climbing a fraggin' rock and you'd have taken your brother with you."

"It was less than thirty meters to the top of the Pit-be-damned cliff!" Sideswipe snapped, crossing his arms. "I'm not stupid, Ratchet, no matter what you might think. Sometimes an accident is nothing but a fraggin' accident!"

"Free climbing was dangerous on Cybertron. It's even more dangerous on an organic world like this one, where the rock layers all have different properties. Taking risks in the war was one thing. Doing it now, when you both have your whole lives ahead of you, is stupid."

"Neither one of us is going to sit in the corner and watch dust collect," Sideswipe replied, quiet and reasonable for a change, which abrupt deviation from "normal for Sideswipe" made Ratchet stop ranting and listen. "Sometime, somewhere, one of us is going to offline and take the other along for the ride. That's how it goes. We understand that. I think sometimes, you don't. If we never take risks, if we waste all our time hiding from anything that might go wrong, we aren't living. We might burn out, but we won't rust out. Why did we fight a war at all, if it wasn't so we could live now that it's over?"

Ratchet threw his servos in the air. "Do what you want—you will anyway. You can go, but don't stress any of your systems beyond a yellow alert for the next orn. I'll want to see you then for a recheck, unless something starts throwing alerts, then you need to come straight back here, at high speed. Got it?"

"I got it."

Sides made his escape. Ratchet shook his head, then started cleaning his medbay to prepare for the next invasion of complete fraggin' idiots. Probably, with his luck, in matched sets of two.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

Sam and Epps were thankful to get out of Florida and back to NEST HQ in Washington. After making their reports, Sam drove Epps to Andrews to catch a flight back to Nevada, then he finally had the chance to do something about the phone he'd found.

He jogged up to Simmons' office. The New Yorker had his braced leg up on an upended wastepaper basket, a pair of forearm crutches rested against his desk. He was munching peanuts as he worked his way through a stack of police reports that might indicate Decepticon activity. He had a NEST cell stuck to his ear, talking to Jazz about one of them.

Sam knocked on the door frame. "Got a minute?"

"Sure, pull up a chair."

Sam did and tossed the phone on the desk. "Thanks. You know anything about phones?"

"You talk on 'em."

"I mean, can you download stuff off of them?"

He looked at it. "Cheapo burner phone. Sure, I can crack this. Where'd you get it?"

"Do you want to know?"

He looked around, weighing the benefits of ignorance versus information, and saw no one watching. "Inquiring minds."

"It was on the couch where those people killed themselves."

"I thought, murder-suicide."

"It didn't look like she objected. I think he just drew the short straw to fire the gun. It turns out, the lady had terminal cancer. But if he made a call on this phone before he did it, or if someone called him..."

"Why didn't you give this to the cops?"

"I didn't remember sticking it in my pocket until after the explosion, when we were back in our hotel room. I don't think they were all that interested in investigating it, they just wanted to mark it down as a murder-suicide and close the case. The CIA guys were even less interested. When I thought about giving it to them, I was afraid it would get swept under the rug. It might be a lead to Helix."

Simmons told Jazz, "Something's come up, I'll call you back in a few minutes." Then he dug in his desk drawer for the right cable to attach the phone to his laptop. That took longer than accessing its files and getting into the phone company records for more information about the last call.

"He called another burner phone, Sam. The call went to a tower in downtown Sequoia Falls, California."

"Where's that?"

"Some hole in the wall town on the north coast I never heard of before," Simmons told him.

"What do we do now?"

"I'll flag the other phone. It's been used several times all over that little town. If they didn't throw it away after the Darnells died, we might pick it up again. But I think you'll have to go out there and nose around. You're the one who stole the phone, you get to report this to Charlotte."

"I didn't mean to steal it."

"It just jumped in your pocket on its own?"

"I don't mean that. It just kinda happened—and then there was the bomb—and then the CIA guys showed up. For all we know, Darnell could have called an old friend to say goodbye."

"That's possible. Doesn't mean it didn't have anything to do with Helix, though."

Sam knew he needed a few more pieces before he could make sense of this puzzle. He took a deep breath and trudged down the hall to confess to Mearing that he had liberated evidence from a crime scene. She was not going to be happy with him. At all.

He wondered what his pregnant wife would say when he showed up at their apartment with his ass, which he expected to have handed to him by Mearing in the near future, tucked neatly into the crook of one elbow.

-Sidhe Chronicles-

"You son of a bitch," said Bobby Epps, curling one hand into a fist.

The physician raised both hands, palm-out. "Hey, I'm sorry," Dr. Bruttamano said. "I know it's bad news." He also knew he was facing an Army Ranger.

But "bad news" didn't cover it. That Bobby's and Monique's youngest child, their "surprise package" as they called D'andre, was probably autistic was catastrophic, soul-changing, life-wrenching information. And this creep called it "bad news"? At that point, Monique Epps abandoned any idea of chastising her husband for his language, and scowled at the doctor herself.

Bruttamano did not burst into flame or dissolve, but he grew pink around the ears. "I suggest that you institutionalize the boy. His problems will only get worse over time. He'll destroy your marriage, and wreck your other kids' childhood. Get out while you can." The doctor stood, and took his own advice.

When the door shut behind Bruttamano's stooped shoulders, Bobby Epps unclenched his fist. "No. We aren't going to do that. I'll ask Parker to recommend somebody else. How has that creep stayed in practice? He's got the bedside manner of Ironhide!"

Monique, who didn't know either, shook her head. "Come on, Bobby, let's go home."

Later that day there was a knock on Parker's door. "Hey, Bobby, come on in," she said, turning her chair to face the visitor's seat.

"Doc. Hey, one of the docs over at Universal Medical Care gave us some bad news the other day, and we wanna get another doctor's opinion. Anybody you recommend among the pediatricians in Vegas?"

"Yeah, I really like the woman who sees Johnny. Are you sure it's a gatekeeper you need, though? If you need a specialist, Tricare says I have to refer you myself."

"One of our kids might be autistic."

"Ah." She drew drew a prescription pad to her, and wrote several lines on it. "Any of these people might do. See if you can get in to see the last one, though, because she's not only good, she's compassionate."

They were lucky, Bobby and Monique; the doctor had a free hour, first of the day's appointments, two weeks out.

Monique had warned this new pediatrician that she was bringing D'andre in, and what that entailed. They said they would get him into an exam room the moment he arrived.

D'andre still was not happy. His day was being disrupted. He wanted to put his blocks in order, but he didn't have them. His mother had made sure that he had the smaller-but-identical set with him in his car seat, but they weren't his blocks.

In the back seat, D'andre set up a keening whine. His parents exchanged glances, and Bobby Epps exited the freeway.

Monique got into the back with D'andre, and arranged his blocks out of order on the little tray jiggered for his car seat. That was more than D'andre could bear, and he began to flail and thrash.

And scream. Monique passed Bobby a set of ear plugs, put her own in.

By the time they got out of the car, D'andre had screamed himself into the exhausted sobbing of a child who could see no future wherein he got what he so desperately needed. Monique's heart always curled in on itself a little when they got to this stage; Bobby's did too, she knew.

But Bobby was a Ranger. He picked his son up, cradled him gently against his shoulder, and let him wail; by the time they walked into Hospital Giganticus and found the way to the pediatrician's office, D'andre had a thumb in his mouth, and was hiccupping sniffles.

That didn't mean he wouldn't start up again with very little provocation. But this respite for them all allowed Monique to get to reception in the doctor's office, twelve minutes ahead of their appointment, which meant that they got into the exam room. Surrounded by silence and calm, D'andre began to recover himself.

When the pediatrician walked in, he was ordering the smaller blocks Monique had scooped into her purse. When she brought them out and gave them to D'andre, Bobby looked at her with admiration and said, "Damn, I married a smart woman."

"I thought I married a smart man, too, but you keep cussin' in front of the children."

Bobby grinned at her, and the doctor's knock sounded on the door.

"Hello," said the middle-aged woman, shutting the door behind her. "I'm Dr. Callas." She went to the sink in the room, and washed her hands.

"Bobby Epps, my wife Monique, and our son D'andre."

"Nice to meet you," said the doctor, taking a seat and pulling her pen out of the pocket protector. "So why are we seeing D'andre today?"

Monique began the tale. The oversensitivity to loud noise. The obsession with order. The unwillingness to make eye contact. The odd, fiddling patterns of play. The lack of social interaction with his large, loud, loving family.

"And all of my kids," Monique summed up, "went through a phase where peek-a-boo was the most exciting game in the world. D'andre hasn't…not by the time he was two and a half, and all of the others outgrew it around then."

D'andre had an inability to tolerate life, in short, in ways that kept his parents hopping and were beginning to impact the other children. "It's hard for them to do homework when D'andre is having problems," Monique said simply. "And they can't do anything to help him, which is harder yet."

"Well, let's start with the obvious," the physician replied, rising and going to the examination table. "Hello, D'andre."

D'andre continued sorting his blocks. Dr. Callas frowned, and said, "D'andre?"

The little boy did not so much look at her. She went to the sink and washed her hands, drying them thoroughly on a towel and rubbing them together, to warm them. She sank down to D'andre's level, and smiled at him.

He averted his head.

Then she said, gently, "I'm going to pick you up, D'andre," and reached for him.

Bobby's son screamed at her touch. Screamed when she looked in his ears, in his eyes. Screamed louder when she warmed the stethoscope in one hand, and put it to his chest. (But even a screaming child has to take a breath now and then, and during that breath, she could hear his heart beat, sound as a bell.)

Once she removed herself from D'andre's immediate vicinity, the boy calmed. He didn't look to either parent, shrugged himself out from under Monique's comforting hand, and returned to his blocks.

Dr. Callas flipped a few pages back in her file. "D'andre was healthy two weeks ago and I'm reluctant to duplicate tests which may upset him without point. Let me ask you, does he enjoy movement? Being swung or bounced on your knee?"

D'andre's parents exchanged looks. "The few times we've tried that," Bobby said, "it seemed to overwhelm him. He doesn't really like to be picked up."

"Okay. How did he react to today's disturbance in his daily routine?"

"He wasn't happy. The blocks he's playing with? He has a bigger set at home. He prefers them."

"If he wants a physical object, does he ask for it?"

"No. He points."

"He points," D'andre said, and went back to his blocks.

"Can you usually pinpoint a reason for his distress when he's upset?"

"Not always," Bobby said. Monique added, "And sometimes it's noises that don't upset the other kids, like the alarm on a truck backing up. That noise makes him crazy. He'll cover his ears and scream until it stops."

The doctor nodded. "Does he play with the other kids? Normally, about this time, we start to see tag-alongs: whatever the older kids are doing, the younger ones want to be involved."

"No," Monique said, after glancing at Bobby. "D'andre prefers to play alone."

"He's just out of the terrible twos. Has he stopped tantruming?"

"No. He started early, about a year and a half, and he's never really stopped."

The doctor watched D'andre for a moment. "I've seen for myself that he doesn't care to make eye contact. Is that present at home, as well?"

"Yes. If you make eye contact with him, he breaks it immediately."

"Have you had cause to wonder if he's deaf? Spoken to him, but he ignores you?"

"Yeah," said Bobby, "but he's not deaf. We had him tested for that when he began to ignore us. His hearing's fine."

"Hmmm," said the doctor, and tapped her short nails against the clipboard she held. "We may have to investigate whether D'andre suffers from autism. He's showing many of the signs, I'm afraid."

Bobby and Monique looked at one another. "Autism?" Bobby finally said. "Isn't that..."

"It's a spectrum of psychological difference that isn't well understood, as yet," the doctor said. "As you've experienced, it's fairly disruptive to family life. And you have other children to consider, too―" she leafed through the file―"five, it says here."

"Yeah. D'andre's our youngest."

"Well," Dr. Callas said, "this is going to require some thinking on your parts. D'andre can be helped at this point; when he's a little older, we'll be better able to pinpoint where, exactly, he falls on the spectrum. But he is outside the range of 'normal' in his reactions to sensation, and will need more help than many children do to adapt to school and work. As you may imagine, treatments vary widely depending on the severity of the child's affliction, up to and including institutionalization."

"No!" said both D'andre's parents together.

The doctor didn't smile. She had seen too many parents start here, and end up, ten years later, with their marriage destroyed and their other children psychological basket cases, finally, when it was too late to be of much help to the autistic, putting him or her into the hands of professionals. "We're a long way from there," she said patiently. "Let's let D'andre tell us what he needs. I'll have my staff assemble some reading material for you."

"Thank you," Monique said, with a troubled glance at her husband. Bobby was about to explode. "Would you have it mailed, please, as we need to get D'andre back to his regular routine."

Monique waited until they were out of the hospital, and D'andre seemed to be happy with his blocks in his car seat. "Bobby…what's going on?"

Her husband clenched his hands on the steering wheel. "I wanted to hit that bitch. I wanted to pound her into hamburger. Never mind that she's a woman. I still wanted to do that. I will never allow a child of ours to be institutionalized. Never."

Monique sighed. "I know that, baby," she said. "You will never leave any of us. Ever."

That affirmation of his identity calmed Bobby. "So what do we do, Mo? What's best for D'andre?"

"We can't know yet," his wife said, with the calmness that had first attracted him to her, and then convinced him that she was The One. "So we let D'andre tell us what he needs. And then, Bobby, if staying with us makes him unhappy, we find a place for him to live that makes his life better. If he just can't live with us, and he tears up the other kids too, I won't say he has to stay. He's fine as long as he's happy. When he can't be happy with us no more, it's time to let him go into his own life."

"Never."

"I know, baby, I know. It ain't what I want either. But we gotta put D'andre, and the others, ahead of ourselves on this one. You know?"

"I know, Mo, but you can't do this alone. You won't have to. I retired once, I can do it again. If it comes to that, I'll take care of our son 24/7 so you can have time for the rest of the children. If he needs help we can't give, we'll get it for him, but I ain't puttin' him in a facility somewhere unless he needs some kind of round the clock high-tech medical care that he absolutely cannot have at home."

That was no empty promise, she knew. Bobby had spent the last two weeks reading everything he could find on autism, and making a battle plan.

"We won't live forever, and what happens to him then?"

"I haven't figured it out that far ahead, baby, but trust me, I will, soon's I can. A long time before we start pickin' out rockin' chairs. I'm gonna start by talkin' to the Colonel and see if I can get transferred to somethin' where I won't have to take as many chances. Can't afford to be Denzel fu-raggin' Washington anymore."

"Honey, as far as I'm concerned, figurin' out what we're gonna do for D'andre is more heroic than anythin' you could do with a gun in your hand."

"Yeah. Well. Maybe. I didn't become somebody's Dad to bail, Mo, and I won't now."

"I know, baby. I know. But givin' up the Rangers, Bobby?"

He squeezed her fingers gently. "Will if I have to babe, for you and D'andre."

End Part 10