Rhia slowly came back to awareness. She stretched her arms and yawned.

"Had a good sleep there, girly?" a boy next to her said and she jumped. She looked around herself and saw that she was in a truck, and the person driving was laughing. "Sorry, there," he said when he regained himself. "I didn't mean to scare you."

"Where am I? Who are you?" said Rhia in perfect English. The boy looked like a teenage version of Lord Amniculus without the pointed ears. He also wore a t-shirt of a fire dragon and blue jeans.

"You're out of the Zeus' Thunder outpost in Arkansas, and my name is Scott Eagle," the boy said. "I know you're Lady Rhiannon. I was planning on getting you out of there, but you kinda did that yourself."

"I did?"

"You don't remember?" he asked confused. "Well, you did kind of look as though another personality took over. You had red markings on your face and your eyes were red."

Rhia kept her shock from showing. She knew now what he was talking about; that monster part of her had come out before. One of her mother's boyfriends had beat her mother severely and nearly killed herself. She remembered getting slapped across the room and her head hit the sharp edge of a table, and then there was a gap in her memories until she awoke in the hospital. Her mother refused to tell her what happened, but Rhia scanned her memories and saw that she had gone berserk and nearly killed the guy.

"It happened before, didnt it?" Scott asked.

"Huh?" she said coming back to reality.

"You've gone berserk before today, haven't you?"

She considered telling him for a moment, then she said, "Only once before."

"What is it? Some sort of alternate personality?"

"I'm not sure. All I know about is that it will only come out in extreme conditions. It can identify friends and foes, but it mostly reacts on instinct."

"It recognized me when I ran into you after the outpost was destroyed. It sniffed me and realized I was a friend."

"How is it that you came to know about that outpost?" she asked when she realized something. "If it recognized you as a friend then you were there when I was being tortured."

"My foster family supports Zeus Thunder," he told her. "I was the black sheep among them because I wanted no part of their little rebel group. They took me to wherever Zeus Thunder went and I had to drop out of school because of that."

While he spoke, Rhia scanned his memories and saw that he was telling the truth.

How sad, she thought. How could his government abandon him like that?

"How is it that you got captured?" Scott asked. "I thought you would have been too well guarded to be captured."

"Makishima had the element of surprise," she told him, "and we didn't expect him to be in the area after his attack on our HQ. My guards were slaughtered, and there was no way for me to escape so I induced myself into a coma state that turns off my Zoalord DNA until I wake up. My body may have been asleep, but my mind remained awake for when I needed to awaken."

"You endured all that torture while you were asleep?"

"Yes. I even heard your argument with the man in charge of my torture."

"That was my foster brother."

They fell silent for a moment, and then she said, "I might fall back asleep soon. My body's still repairing itself from what they did to me the past month."

"Get as much sleep as you need," he told her. "The nearest town is an hour away, well be getting a meal there before we head onto Little Rock and thats a good two and a half hour drive."

"Okay," she said and laid her head against the window. She closed her eyes and fell into a deep, deep sleep that the bumps in the road couldn't awake her from.

Scott focused on driving them to the town of Clarksville, and that was when another dream started for Rhia.