Chapter Eleven

Claire clicked the little flash drive that Micah Sanders had given her into place on her computer. She took a deep breath and double tapped her mouse over the file to open it.

Operation Miranda is now in progress:

It seems that hard science alone will not solve the enigma of her for us. We have discovered that the presence of the catalyst is needed for her creation. Our review board members have poured over thousands of files for nearly ten years and believe that we have finally found two suitable test subjects for the Miranda project.

When Arthur Petrelli was determined to have held the source of the catalyst and was subsequently killed, we feared that the operation would become impossible to complete. However, the catalyst has been revealed to have surfaced again in one of our subjects.

Here is our data collected so far as well as extensive performance reviews for the combatant targets you have requested.

Claire forgot how to breathe again for a few minutes as she flipped through the documents on her screen. All the data they had mentioned collecting seemed to revolve around her and Sylar.

Reports on all of their regulation testing, blood work, ability analysis, in depth reviews of every hostile they had been assigned to take down, the experiment with Brandon Miller, all of their history dating back to each of their births were recorded here. A collection of surveillance photos of her and Sylar together were attached. Every minute of their interactions from the work related to the personal were being watched.

A lab report from Suresh caught her attention. It was from the day that Sylar had made her join him in the observation room so that he could prod her for information. Most of the graphs and technical jargon didn't mean anything to her, but the picture of them together did.

Mohinder had captured a photograph of them as they struggled against one another on the floor. But it wasn't just a normal picture. The machine he had used was purposed for identifying energy sources and fields. Surrounding Claire on the floor was a bright burst of intense white light and a cloud of dark blue light was emanating from Sylar. Where they touched, the energies combined to create an anomaly of some kind. Suresh had noted that the power generated by the two being in one another's personal space alone had been enough to produce electricity for half of New York, but when they touched, it had magnified to an astronomical value bordering a refined process of cold fusion.

Below his notes, Mohinder had tagged the picture as the moment Sylar remembered telling her that he loved her before. Further attachments included brain scans he had taken during their testing. The highlighted areas were supposed to represent their emotional status regarding one another as well as the physiological responses that occurred from their joint presence.

"Claire, where the hell have you been?" Noah demanded with a flushed face.

She quickly shut her lap top and tried to give a weak and sheepish smile. Her father stomped up to her desk and laid his clenched fists on either side of her computer.

"I don't know what is going on here, but it has to stop. You can't just run off anytime you feel like it. We have a serious business going on here that you're a part of whether you like it or not now. And I really do not appreciate being left in dark about this Nathan Petrelli business."

She shuddered at the thought of the psychopathic impersonator.

"I had to go to Peter yesterday to learn anything about it," he picked the figurines from her snow globe out of his pocket and set them down on the top of her computer. "From now on, you can consider yourself grounded from active duty. Until this maniac is taken into custody neither you or your team will be completing anymore objectives."

"But-"

"No 'buts', Claire. You've already nearly been killed thanks to a Shanti virus exposure and Peter seems pretty sure that this guy was the source of it. I will not have you or anyone else in the unit put in danger like that!"

He was still angry, but his features had also become solemn. A pang of guilt for the pain she had caused him with secrets wracked her gut. Claire got up from her chair and joined her father in a tight hug.

"You saw what he did to the secondary team, dad. He was outnumbered nine to one by some of the best agents the department had and he destroyed them. I want to tell you that everything will be okay and that I'll stay safe and be your good little Claire Bear, but I can't leave this case alone. We're the only ones that can stop him."

Noah let out a resigned sigh and let go of his daughter.

"I know." They both shuffled their feet a little bit. "Just promise me one thing," he pointed his finger sternly, "no more secrets."

Claire smiled and tried not to look in the direction of her computer.

"You got it," she said going in for another hug. Her father smiled back and left the office.

Matt Parkman whistled as he strolled into his office. He peeked into the little brown bag that Janice had prepared for his lunch and found a magnificent spectacle of a pastrami sandwich with not one, but two of his favorite flavor of pudding cup. The urge to skip a little bit had to be suppressed. He loved that woman.

Opening the door he noticed a slim brown envelope sitting on his computer keyboard. Matt dropped his lunch off on the corner of his desk and ripped open the letter. A small silver key slid from the package along with a note reading:

Matters of importance lurk unseen, capture the enemy with evidence unclean.

An address followed beneath the cryptic message.

"Morning Dr. Suresh," Eddie the mail clerk chimed. "Got a few letters for you today. Looks mighty important!"

He was always such a kind and happy man, but Mohinder always got the impression that maybe his memory had been erased one to many times and parts of it had stopped coming back.

"Thank you, Eddie," he said nodding politely and taking his mail. He thumbed through a few acquisition forms and an analytical study he had requested from the botany department for his research with a curious young man that grew exotic botanical life everywhere he walked. Mohinder looked over his shoulder and sighed again at the sight of a bed of Dionaea muscipula that had sprung from the concrete floor of the observation room.

A brown envelope slipped from the bottom of the stack and flittered to the surface of his desk. Normally he was busy enough that he may not have even given the simple parcel a second thought, but the odd lack of any form of address caught his attention.

Mohinder slid the blade edge of his stationary opener along the crease and plucked a small silver key from the envelope. A mysterious message accompanied the key reading:

You see inside the soul with your twisted science, but guilty is as guilty does in this dark alliance.

He studiously examined the rhyme attempting to make sense of the it. An address also followed.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Sylar's eyelids fluttered a little as he was coming to consciousness. There was something moist dripping on his forehead. He rolled over with a deep groan imagining the leaky ceiling that he had thought of as a sadistic kind of Chinese water torture on so many rainy days before.

Why did his head hurt so much? A searing pain threatened to split his skull in half as it throbbed from the back of his neck upwards.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

More droplets splattered over his shoulder.

I wonder if I could get away with slaughtering my super. He pulled his sheet a little higher. It was soaked and cold.

Damn it. Sylar rolled over again and opened his eyes, meeting another pair blankly staring back at him. His heart skipped a beat.

Above him was Charisma Jones, crucified to his ceiling with a mass of random objects protruding from her body. Her eyes were glazed over and cold. She had been dead for several hours that way.

The dark man leapt from his bed. Her blood had soaked through most of the dingy white sheets and stained the floor area around his air mattress.

Sylar desperately tried to remember what had happened. He recalled last night, coming home and telling her to get out of his apartment. He remembered yelling at his partner pretty viciously but he hadn't wanted to physically hurt her.

What have I done?

He rummaged around for his company phone and punched in a number. It rang once and went straight to voice mail.

"Claire, I need you. I think I've done something really bad."

Forgive the somewhat lack of empirical data to support our findings, but we believe the catalyst in itself to be the essence of pure light, a sort of fifth element so to speak. While we have documentation that cites several instances where the catalyst was purposefully passed on from one keeper to another, as philosophical as it may seem, we also believe that the catalyst somehow chooses for itself to whom it may belong.

One chosen person for each generation acts as a guardian for this light. With the appearance of Miranda however, this cycle seems to have broken. The effects of such a fundamental change will be closely watched in the future.

A gentle knock at her door removed Claire from her reverie and she quickly closed her computer again.

"Hey, Claire, you got a minute?" Peter poked his head through the door. She didn't exactly welcome his presence just then, but she didn't deny it either. "You're not answering your phone," he said taking a seat in front of her desk.

"I've already been chewed out once this morning and if I remember correctly O.S.H.A. standards say I can only have one person riding my ass at a time."

Her uncle nodded and smiled a little despite the harsh tone she had used with him.

"Noah was pretty worried about you. I guess I wasn't really all that surprised that you were keeping this whole thing from him though. I told him everything because I thought he deserved to know. He's your father, Claire. He loves you and just wants to see you safe."

"How much control do you have over the missions we're sent out on?" Claire had picked a spot in the corner of her ceiling over his head to space herself into.

"Um, I have to review case files and sign off on them but it's mostly filtered down through the F.B.I. and Homeland Security. Why?"

Claire hesitated without saying anything for a long minute before deciding to show him what she had found. She opened her lap top again and clicked on the file that included all of their combat reviews as well as an ongoing list of targets. Spinning the computer around so that he could read the listings she watched as his face contorted with nearly every emotion a man has the capacity to express.

"Where did you find this?" he finally demanded after lifting his head from his hands.

"That's not important. What is important is the fact that we're being used by somebody higher up on the ladder. All the good work that we thought we were doing was just someone else's dirty laundry. I thought this department was put together to stop that kind of thing from happening, Peter. Are we just the next generation of baggers and taggers?"

He groaned deeply to himself and rubbed his temples. Long frown lines formed around his mouth as well as a worrisome amount of creases in his forehead. This job was making him old before his time.

"You know you just stepped all over national security, right?"

"Seriously? That's all you can say about this? What in the hell have they done to you, Peter? Where's my heroic crime fighting uncle that would have jumped into action to stop this?"

He sighed again and leaned back in his chair.

"I suppose that it also doesn't bother you that whoever is really operating this place is also planning to harvest my power to make some kind of freaky super weapon."

To this, he finally reacted like the Peter Petrelli that she knew and loved.

"What?" he asked with alarmed eyebrows as he sat straight up in the chair.

"Operation Miranda. They've been keeping track of me and Sylar, studying us and what we can do. They want to make a weapon that they can control."

He started shaking his head emphatically. "You can't know about Miranda."

"You did?" She felt like screaming at him and throwing anything handy in his direction.

"I'm one of about ten people in the world that's supposed to know about her. Miranda isn't a weapon, Claire and she doesn't have anything to do with you or Sylar. She's a person. A girl. There's only been a few proven sightings of her and she's powerful, Claire. More powerful than all of us combined. If you found something on her it's because you stumbled onto something you shouldn't have. They've been keeping an eye out for her but that's all we do against her for now."

She knew he was telling the truth as he knew it to be. But she also had the hard evidence to prove otherwise. An idea had been forming while the conversation with Peter was wrapping up and the minute he was on his way she put it into action. Claire looked carefully down the hall for anyone that might be watching and shut the door, locking it. She pulled out her phone and dialed Matt's extension line.

"Hey, Matt, it's Claire."

"Oh, hey. What's up," his voice buzzed on the other end of the line.

"I need a quick favor."

"Oh, boy. You know I hate it when you say that, right?"

"No worries, nothing big. I just need you to connect me to Molly for a minute."

"…Do you have to know where she is?"

"No, no. I'm just working this case and we need some help finding someone."

"…Well…Okay I guess. Hang on."

Claire tapped her foot as she waited to be patched through to Molly Walker. Because of her ability to find anyone, anywhere in the world at any time, the young girl always managed to be a target for someone. Parkman had slipped her away to an undisclosed location and absolutely refused to give out information on her.

"Hello?"

"Molly, hi. This is Claire Bennett at the Department of Safety-"

"Yeah, I know. Matt just told me that you need me to find someone."

"Yes, I do. I need to find a girl named Miranda. She's a 'special' like us and I think someone is out to get her so we have to find her before they do."

"Just a sec, I have to get my maps." Claire could hear some shuffling in the background and a long silent pause. Molly sniffled a few times.

"Um… You're not going to like this."

"What? What's wrong?"

"I found her but…"

"But?"

"I don't really know how to explain it. It's like she's everywhere and nowhere at the same time. There isn't any single location for her like there usually is. I've never seen anything like it."

Claire groaned to herself and pushed her fingers through her hair in agitation.

"Okay, Molly. Thanks anyways."

"No problem."

With an abrupt click the girl was gone and Claire was left to her own aggravating thoughts.

"Do you have any idea what this is about?" Mohinder asked as he entered the bus depot with Matt Parkman.

"No idea. I just got this creepy message and an address with this key," he muttered holding up the shiny silver object.

They walked together to the line of storage lockers and found the two compartments with matching numbers to their keys. Chris McKinley was also there, standing with a pensive look on his face like he was thinking about trying to open a locker without touching it.

"Don't tell me, you got some cryptic rhyme that told you to come here," Matt said as he approached the young agent.

"Yeah, how did you know?" McKinley seemed more than a little surprised at Parkman's accurate guess work. He just held up his key in response.

"Any ideas as to what we're going to find?" Mohinder too gave his locker heavy visual concentration.

"Nope," Chris answered. He stepped forward and unlocked his assigned unit. Inside he found a D.S.R.E.C. badge and standard issue pistol belonging to a field agent like himself. Charisma Jones, 0104, the engraving read.

Mohinder took a deep breath and steeled himself for what he might find. Inside the locker was a file folder full of his own studies. They were scans that he had passed off as being false positives or unreliable because of circumstance. The pile of scans were all the ones that showed the signs and symptoms of deep aggression in Sylar.

Now it was Parkman's turn. He unlocked the last storage unit in the row. Inside he also found a file folder, but one much more disturbing than what the other two had revealed. Crime scene photos and reports of grisly murders that Noah Bennett had been assigned to investigate glared at Matt. All of the victims had been maimed or dismembered in some way as well as missing the top halves of their skulls.

Ominous looks were passed between each member of the trio. Chris pulled out his company phone and dialed a number. He paced back and forth as it rang for well over a minute.

"Agent Jones didn't report today and now she's not answering her phone," he said darkly.

"Well, you know she and Sylar are sleeping together. Maybe they're playing hooky," Matt attempted to remain optimistic even though he felt pretty sure that they were all about to see what Janice had packed him for lunch that day. He had been so sure that Sylar really had changed. He had been around him on a near daily basis and never read anything to the contrary but the proof stared back at him in sickening detail.

"I don't care how good the guy is in bed, that woman has never missed a day of work in her life," Chris responded still staring hopefully at his phone.

"Where are you going?" Mohinder called after the young agent as he began to march away with purpose.

"To look for my team mate!" he shouted over his shoulder.

Parkman and Suresh exchanged worried glances before silently agreeing to follow along on the quest.

"Claire, I need you. I think I've done something really bad." Sylar's voice loomed ominously in the air in front of her as Claire checked her voice mail for the third time to make sure that she had not somehow misunderstood the message. Her mind flashed back to their conversation about the possibility of him turning bad again and she shuddered.

He was different now. He couldn't do anything like that. She knew it. She felt it. Didn't she?

Claire closed her eyes and tried to clear her mind, and then she concentrated on Sylar. She pictured his eyes looking back at her and the way she got that weird little tickle on the back of her neck when he was nearby. There was that inexplicable tugging sensation again, like an invisible rope that tethered her to him. She obediently followed the strange instinct across the city and up to the roof of a seemingly random building that she didn't recognize.

Sylar stood there with his back to her, leaning on his elbows over the edge of the roof top terrace and looked out over the city below him.

"I knew you would find me. Even up here," he said without turning to face her. Claire walked to his side and placed her hands on the railing. He put his hand on top of hers and their fingers laced together automatically. The sun was setting. It was peaceful watching it from up there.

"Charisma's dead." He stated without looking at her. She nodded quietly. "I don't know how it happened. I don't remember… I didn't want to hurt her."

Claire couldn't help herself. She stood on her toes and wrapped her arms around his neck, forcing him to look her in the eye.

"I know." And it was the truth. She did know. She could feel it in every fiber of his being. "Gabriel," she started but he turned away from her again.

"You shouldn't use that name and expect it to have an effect on me just because it's you saying it."

The words hurt.

Claire pulled herself over the railing and balanced on the ledge of the terrace. Twenty stories below her were hundreds of oblivious pedestrians moving about their everyday lives like ants. Cars honked at one another for passage through the narrow street.

"Claire, what are you doing?"

She stretched her arms out past her sides and allowed herself to fall forward into a swan dive. Air rushed over her plummeting body, whipping her hair wildly and stinging her eyes. The ground was rapidly approaching but she felt no fear.

At the last possible moment before impact Sylar swooped by and snatched her in his arms.

"Claire, you're insane," he snapped, followed by unintelligible curses as he touched down on the ground. He was furious with her.

"But that's why you're my hero," she said gesturing towards the air above them with a wide beaming smile. It took a long minute of him staring at her with frustration, but he finally cracked and returned the grin.

McKinley took one last lingering look at his two companions, raised his pistol and kicked in the door to the low rent apartment. He and Matt quickly scoped out the debilitated living arrangements for their suspect in the fashion of trained officers and agents while Suresh humbly followed behind them making odd faces at the hovel.

Chris stepped into the small bedroom and immediately returned. His face had turned a sickly shade of pale white and he hooked his arm around his head to stifle a heave. Parkman entered the room to see what the deal was and had to run to the bathroom to be sick.

The agent picked up his phone and dialed another number. "Noah, it's Chris. Sylar's officially gone off the reservation… Yeah, I've got the proof. We found Jones."