Please bear with me through this one...

When it was done, she called him.

"Were you able to retrieve 452's body?"

She knew he'd ask about her. It wasn't easy to let go of an obsession. "No, Sir, the building had collapsed by the time we got here."

"Collapsed?" He didn't sound very pleased.

"Yes Sir."

"Seems like the old man really knew what he was doing. Even now he just couldn't let me have her..."

She didn't say anything to that. She knew it wasn't really meant for her. It was his anger speaking, nothing more.

"Alright then. Regroup and hunt down the last stragglers - I want them all out of Washington. You have a week. - And get me that tall one, alive."

"Yes, Sir." With that, she ended the call and stared down at the young soldier she had just killed. Time to go and catch some more freaks. The boss wanted a trophy. If it couldn't be 452, bringing him the tall one had to suffice.

Max sat crammed in beside Alec and Joshua in the back of Logan's car. He and Mole were talking in the front, their low voices reaching her ears but not quite registering. Her mind was occupied with other things.

The kids...

She remembered Alec's call; she remembered finding him in that phone booth, battered, almost broken. She shot a furtive glance to where he was sitting right next to her now, his shoulder pressed into hers. Nothing gave away that he had been severely injured only a few days ago. Even though she knew first hand how quickly they all healed, it never quite ceased to amaze her.

Max could tell that Alec was caught in a jumble of his own thoughts and musings. Staring out the window, he seemed to notice her gaze nonetheless. Without a word, he took her hand in his.

"I can't believe what they did," she suddenly said, as if the little contact of their hands had been the encouragement she had needed.

"It's what they were trained to do," Alec muttered, as if speaking to himself.

"What about their sense of survival? They taught us-"

"Max. What they taught us and what they taught them - those are two entirely different sets of values." He turned around and stared at her. She couldn't help but think that he looked a little distraught. "I've been going over this in my mind. - Remember what they told us, how they were 'designed after you, to get rid of all of the flaws?'"

She nodded. How could she have forgotten any of it? How could she have forgotten that moment? When the two young soldiers had given up their lives for them. Because they had been told to protect her, and because they had been so sure that she would lead the rest of them to freedom...

She had failed them. In the end they had not even let her try. She felt hopeless anger and pain and grief bubble up inside of her, threatening to surface, when she felt Alec's grip on her hand tighten.

"What are you guys talking about? Those kids you keep mentioning? Were they some new Manticore project?" Logan interrupted, but Mole nudged his side. "I'd leave those two to talk it out by themselves," he suggested, giving Logan a sideways glance. Momentarily speechless, the ordinary merely nodded, understanding. This was not the time. He might not like it, he might be annoyed and possibly even hurt by it, but this was not his business, not right now. He bit his lip and stared out the windshield, trying to seem unperturbed. Mole felt a little sorry for the fella He was indeed growing soft he figured and shook his head, quietly continuing to listen to the X5s' conversation.

Alec continued without acknowledging the ordinary's questions. "At first I thought they meant you. That they were all modeled after you. You know, no junk DNA and stuff." He paused.

"They used the DNA of all of us," Max amended. "Diversity is key."

Alec nodded. "I think what they meant is, they were 'modeled' after you in that Manticore tried to design the other DNA pools like yours. They tried to get rid of the junk parts."

"The flaws..." Max turned in her seat to look at him more fully.

"Noncoding DNA is still not deciphered. Manticore decided it was junk. By some stroke of genius they managed to create one specimen without any junk DNA: you. Yet they were not able to recreate that. - Not sure they managed it with that newer series."

"Guys!" Logan, who had tried to keep quiet, couldn't hold it in anymore. "Listen, sorry to interrupt," he eyed Mole warily, "but you need to hear this: Sandeman was in this building - at least I saw him there once. Joshua did, too."

Joshua nodded. "Father not himself. Father left Joshua to die in the cell."

"What?!" Mac couldn't believe what she had just heard, Sandeman? "Logan, why the hell didn't you tell us?"

"Sorry, Max. I should have - I... Anyways. What you're saying about those kids, it all makes sense now. Sandeman being there, I mean. It seems like they might have been his newest project and that he had just realized that his plan wasn't working out at all. Like Joshua said, he was not himself. I mean, it was obvious that something wasn't quite right. He seemed depressed, hopeless. I don't know. I chalked it up to you being dead. It was what Fawn had made us all believe..."

His gaze met Max's. She bit her lip when she saw the memory of his pain in his stare.

"So you're saying," Alec summarized, "that the kids were his creations. Possibly his way to create Max 2.0."

"Yeah. And he failed."

"He couldn't get rid of the junk DNA."

"Or," Logan suggested, an idea occuring to him, "he did. But he realized that junk DNA might actually not just be that, junk. Maybe he realized that the - the kids were not like Max, despite their lacking junk DNA. Maybe they were lacking something else, too. They were not what he had expected them to be."

"Huh," Alec made, as a thought occured to him. "When they examined me," he provided, not looking at any of them, "someone said something - they didn't know I could hear them, I think."

How Alec used the word "examined" gave Max a sudden pang. It was the way he said it, like it was nothing, like it was normal. Once again, she realized how different life for him had been.

"They said they had always known who I was. They had known about the 'flawed sequence' or rather, the people at the top had known, not Renfro, not that guy Lydecker. It didn't really mean all that much to me; I didn't catch everything they said. Just that you are what I am not, Max. And that once they had gotten the info they wanted out of me I'd help make the next series perfect."

Max and Logan frowned. Even Mole did. But it was Joshua who surprised them all when he said, "But they didn't go through with it. They knew what makes Alec Alec, but they didn't take it away. Alec still Alec, the flaw is what makes him so. The flaw is not a flaw."

So simple.

Joshua patted his young friend on the leg and smiled a grim smile.

"He's right," Logan said, stunned. "Do you guys think what I think? They must have muddeled with the DNA even more than we thought. Maybe they did find that sequence and extricated it somehow..."

Max and Alec exchanged a glance. Alec wasn't really sure what he should be thinking. Had he been that close to losing his own personality, his self as Josh had just made it sound? - And why had they created him that way if they had always considered it a flaw?

"What if that friggin' flaw manifests itself like it did with Ben, though? What if it means I'll go dark side eventually? No escaping your genes..."

It was Max's turn to squeeze his hand a little tighter. Alec was strangely agitated, but she could feel him calm down a little as he felt her reassuring presence.

"We don't know that," Logan stated. "Any person could go crazy or whatever at some point and that's the thing. We don't know how or why it happens. Manticore might have thought they figured it all out, but maybe they didn't. Apparently they used you guys to make the new series better, perfect even, to diminish any possibility of their creations going rogue. They wanted to recreate you, Max, but failed. With you, they always seem to forget that despite your perfect DNA you were still among the escapees. Maybe that's the key to..."

"Logan, if this is all true, what does it mean that they had gotten the order to protect my life with theirs? I mean, someone, at some point, had told them that it would be the most important directive, the one they had to adhere to and fulfill at all costs. Which is what they did..." Max looked at him, hoping against reason that her friend might have an explanation for her.

"Perfect soldiers." Logan looked at her, saw the treacherous shine of her eyes. "Except, they turned out to be too perfect. If that makes sense."

"They died for this. For me. I don't see how..."

"Someone out there, the person who gave them the order, must have known that you are still more valuable to them than any of their new soldiers, that there's still a secret embedded in your DNA that they haven't figured out. - I don't think it was Sandeman," Logan mused. He ran a hand through his hair repeatedly, trying to make sense of his jumbled thoughts. "He seemed defeated, almost. He must have truly thought you were dead - and along with you all his hopes of saving humanity had died, too."

"But..."

"Geez, guys, you're gonna make my head explode," Alec whined, rubbing his brow. "This is some seriously messed up shit. So you say that these kids might have been as junk free as Maxie here," he patted her on the head, earning him a glare. But he was glad that the gesture had made her forget her grief momentarily, "Or at least almost as junk free, and that they might not have had the 'flawed sequence' either - and that that is why they were too perfect? Coz they, what?"

Logan blinked, going over it all in his head. "That's the question. Honestly, I'm not even sure whether it's because of the missing junk DNA or whether it's a certain sequence in the coded DNA. Like, recent studies suggest that junk DNA might actually have more functions than was previously known. It might be responsible for regulation."

"Regulation?" Max and Alec said at the same time.

"Yes. There's protein-coding DNA and then there's regulating DNA. Since we don't know yet how that regulation works, or what it entails, nobody knows what it means for a human being if you take the regulation out of the equation. In your case, Max - and you're the only confirmed case we know of - nothing seems to be amiss. You are perfect, your physical strength, your intelligence, even your looks..." Logan cleared his throat, feeling slightly embarrassed. Max smiled at him, if a little sadly. "Yet with those kids you encountered, there seemed to be something amiss. Like they couldn't or wouldn't function without a higher order guiding them."

"Regulation," Max muttered, "from outside..."

"Perhaps, yeah."

"So what now? Who do you think is responsible for what happened in that building? Who wanted to kill all of us, all of them? Manticore?"

"Whoever did it must have thought you were dead, Max. I'm thinking it might have been Sandeman."

"Are you serious?" Alec asked, frowning.

"Father kill Max?" Suddenly, Joshua looked very alert. "But father made Max, made Joshua, made all of us."

"I know, big fella. But maybe that's why he thought he should kill us all," Max said, gently touching his cheek. What Logan had sugested made sense to her. "We were his responsibility."

"Wait a sec." Alec closed his eyes, remembering the file that had started all this. The file he had found in Rommie's office. "The file didn't say anything about Sandeman. At all. It was like a general outline of how they wanted to take over the entire country, state by state. It mentioned different cells, laid open their plan of using the S1W."

"Really?" Max couldn't help but say, "Now you wanna talk about what was in that stupid file that got us all here?" Alec grinned at her sheepishly and shrugged before continuing, "But it didn't say anything about who was really in charge, and what they wanted. There was just one weird section where it said something about fulfilling the ultimate order. I assumed they meant take over the world, you know..." he smiled apologetically. Could they blame him for thinking that?

"Anyways. There was nothing about Sandeman, nothing even about Fawn. And I know she was behind a lot of it, so... why don't we try and find that bitch and get her to tell us what the hell is going on?"

"Now you're talking." Mole hadn't said anything in a while. He had silently listened to them talking, had tried to make sense of what he heard. But talking didn't get you anywhere in the long run, did it? He was glad that Alec had finally suggested they actually do something.

Then he saw Joshua's slumped form in the rearview mirror, his sad expression. He saw the exhaustion and grief in Max's eyes, the hollow shadows under Alec's, and he added, if a little grudgingly, "First we go home though. We can make plans once we're in TC."

Nobody said anything after that, like they were suddenly too exhausted to continue. No DNA-sequences, no Manticore, no Sandeman for the rest of the ride.

Until they saw the outlines of Seattle, and then of TC.

They were finally home.

"Sir."

Annoyed, he turned around. He didn't like being interrupted in the middle of things.

"What is it?"

"Sir, you are not going to believe this, but a source tells me that movement has just been spotted in Terminal City, Seattle."

He felt blood rush to his head. "Movement?"

"Sir, it seems like the place is suddenly teeming with trangenics again."

For a moment he was puzzled at how stupid those abominations could be. Returning to that place, making it so easy for him to get rid of a great number of them once and for all. His win, really. Then, another thought formed. Terminal City, that had been her place for them. They had left it.

He was sure they wouldn't return there without her.

Without 452.

"Otto, get the car. Now. We're going on a little trip back to Seattle," he said, put on his coat and followed the other man.

She was still alive after all...